Let's make a politics/ideology test

I don't think we're going to get down votes until you provide a hard limit to the number of things that go on the list. Until then it's "things I care about" and "things I don't care about". If you set a limit of, say, five axis, people will vote their five favorites up, and the others down.

Right, well since we can't put absolutely EVERYTHING on the graph or it would get too crowded, how about six axes? Nice symmetrical graph there.

If we feel that's not enough we can push it up to eight, but anything higher is going to get hard to read.

edited 21st Feb '11 8:01:29 AM by BlackHumor

I'd say three axes.

More complex than the average test, but not so complex as to make reading it impossible. And more importantly, the more axes there are, the harder it will be to drum up questions to match.

Of course, there are a lot of good ideas down there. Hm, perhaps we could display two graphs? A simpler one, with a few broad reaching axes, and a complex one for measuring a lot of other stuff?

The duality could come in handy.

Three axes is ridiculously small for a radar graph.

I doesn't need to be a radar graph; or perhaps a we could have more than just the radar graph.

Since the core idea of this test was "more axes," yes, we will have more than three.

I was rather hoping that some of the choices would jump to the lead and make it obvious how many axes there should be, but that isn't really happening. Six axes (not counting the "how important is each axis" measure) would make the cutoff at +6 (at the time of this writing), so that could work.

One more thing: I'm trying to stay neutral here, but I think we need some kind of morality/religion/values axis. It's a very squishy and subjective thing and I understand all the problems and Unfortunate Implications associated with it, but there's a significant portion of the US population that votes only based on abortion. Our test will not be adequate without some way of incorporating those views.

I vote for 5 axes. 6 could work too. The way I see it, the more axes you have, the more accurate you are, but if you have too many you'll basically be parroting their answers back at the quiz takers.

I don't think religion and values are something you can qualify on a scale. You could measure how traditional their values and beliefs are, and how important they are to them, but not what those beliefs are, since religions and moral philosophies are extremely complicated memeplexes built up of numerous different values in various different combinations, which you couldn't possibly measure on a single axis.

It seems to me that giving a position on axes as the answer should be less focused on than relating you to various viewpoints/telling you how far you are from the typical ones.

So, since we can guarantee at least Civil Liberty will succeed at this point, how about we start coming up with questions?

Sure, Why Not?. But let's try to keep them organized, since we may have 100 or more questions on the final test.

So what kind of philosophy should we have behind the questions?

In other words, should they be along the lines of "Do you support gay marriage?" or "Would you mind giving up rights to gain security?"

How about a mix of questions about specific political positions and more general political philosophy/ideology type questions?

Specific questions that don't make annoying assumptions are better, probably. General questions should be very clear that they are asking "in general". And still should try to cover every answer.

Did this test ever get made? I got into a discussion about ideology quizzes with my classmates, lamenting the absence of a truly perfect and accurate quiz, and I was reminded of this thread.

edited 8th May '11 7:14:04 PM by Grain

Nope, not yet.

I hope it does soon though; this should be interesting.

I'd say a 3-D test, three axes:

Libertarian/Authoritarian (social), Capitalist/Socialist (economic), Interventionist/Non-Interventionist (Foreign Policy).

As for the religion/moral values, I'm not sure if it fits with the rest'o'the test. After all, a person might well be a hardliner Heathen or a fundamentalist Christian and still believe the government has no business bossing people around to make them complain with christian/buddhist/wiccan/heathen/secular values anyway.

edited 9th May '11 5:49:23 AM by SavageHeathen

The biggest problem I had with most of the political tests is that they couldn't distinguish between personal and political beliefs and mistaken 'I don't like it' with 'It should be banned'. We shouldn't fall into this trap, maybe include a button like 'I don't think it's a political issue' in borderline cases

^^ But it's a general ideology test, not a "how much government intervention do you want?" test. Religion is a major part of a person's worldview, whether or not they want it to be enforced by government. If they take it at all seriously, it's certainly going to affect their values and morality.

I'm considering trying my hand at this, given that more recent thread with the crappy quiz, but I'm unsure of where to turn to actually make this thing.

A program? A website? From scratch via raw HTML or java script and posted onto a website of which I am a webmaster?

My ideas insofar:

• The questions should be general and broad reaching, as opposed to highly specific things like "I want more/less taxes", and so on. This is about ideology, after all. Hopefully this will ax the problems with questions related to single issue wank. However, it may be possible to incorporate specifics.
• The results should be good at separating different ways of thinking and somesuch. For example, I shouldn't score even remotely similar to Love Happiness, and people with wildly different ideas in practice shouldn't wind up similar to each other because a few strong answers swung them around.
• Most tests like this seem to over-rely on similarity and categories; I.E., a person who thinks astrology is groovy shouldn't be scored as being liberal, because Christians don't like astrology and Christians are conservative blablabla. I want to avoid this as much as possible, because one can hold many combinations of beliefs.
• The test should be able to properly distinguish people who relate to a given political ideology.

And further:

• Questions will be answered by sliding a slider left or right to show agreement/disagreement, with a checkbox that will grey it out due to a lack of preference or understanding.
• There should be at least 20 questions per axis, in order to maximize accuracy.

Next, an examination of the axes:

• Civil Liberty: This one is certainly good enough to include.
• "The public should have a large say in the workings of the government" vs. "the public should have a weak say in the workings of the government": Again, this one is plenty reasonable to include.
• Intervention in other countries vs. isolationism: This one is kinda "meh" for me; if I were to make this thing, I would like to stick to a good solid 5. If I come up short, then I'll add it.
• Idealism vs. Pragmatism: I dunno about this one, it's plenty possible to hold just about any ideal and yet be pragmatic about it; what's more, this is more like a 1 question thing, not a multiple question one. So I'd skip it.
• Axis for belief in equality of opportunity & Equality of results: These are best combined, I think.

I feel like these few are rather lacking; perhaps something covers ethics, such as deontology and/or virtue ethics VS whatever.

Good idea; my take on some of those axes

• "The public should have a large say in the workings of the government" vs. "the public should have a weak say in the workings of the government": Again, this one is plenty reasonable to include. <— Dunno, out of the various forms of Democracy it's not clear what counts as a "weak say" or a "strong say"; there are plenty of mechanisms where citizens can affect policy - more or less direct elections, demonstrations, sitting on juries, etc. ... and I wouldn't know how to rank various Western countries (or even less political parties) according to that axis.
• Idealism vs. Pragmatism: I dunno about this one, it's plenty possible to hold just about any ideal and yet be pragmatic about it; what's more, this is more like a 1 question thing, not a multiple question one. So I'd skip it. <— So would I, mostly because not a lot of people will say that they aren't pragmatist.

What would be interesting would be phrasing as many questions as possible in terms of tradeoffs, where no choice seems obviously the best, for example:

• Punishing criminals (at the risk of breaking them, or punishing innocents) vs. trying to rehabilitate them (at the risk of failing, and having recidivism)
• Punishing innocents vs. letting criminals go free
• Protecting worker's rights (at the risk of increasing unemployment and reducing international competitivity) vs. making it easier and risk-free to hire people (at the risk of some workers' life being sucky)
• Making "immoral" acts illegal (hate speech, abortion, cloning ... depending on what the people think) vs. allowing immoral acts
• Should governments be allowed to implement widely unpopular measures that are For the Greater Good?
• When the people disagree with experts (economists, mostly), who should the government listen to?

Statistical analysis to find which axes explain the most variation would be neat.

edited 20th Jun '11 1:17:34 AM by SlightlyEvilDoctor

I think one question should ask what the participant's vision of a utopia is like. What would follow would be a multiple-choice section of societal factors based on certain categories. Size of government, defense, drug policy etc.

The problem with that is that it doesn't take real-world constraints into account; i.e. my problem with some visions of Utopia isn't that it would be a bad place to live, but that it just wouldn't work out that way. For example "Taxes are low and the government is small but the military is strong and the infrastructure is well-developed and crime is low" or "Everybody is guaranteed a job with a decent salary and nobody can be fired but people are way more productive and happy than they were in the Soviet Union", etc.

It's easy to imagine a magical candyland, the important questions get answered when you have to deal with difficult tradeoffs.

I'll concede that to you completely, but the point of that would be more so to get a general gauge on what peoples' opinions are with regards to the ends rather than the means. I think it could be quite revealing.

Hmm, the ends/mean distinction would be a good one to make - you could have seperate axes for ends and means.

The two do get kinda mixed up in politics though; people may switch between justifying a given policy on pragmatic or on moral grounds (for socialists: "Wealth redistribution makes a happier, more peaceful society" or "Wealth redistribution is fundamentally moral"; for libertarians: "Taxation discourages business and harms the economy" or "Taxation is armed robbery, it's fundamentally immoral"); and more importantly, politics is also about how to deal with the fact that different people have different values, and how to deal with that: if parents think that what is being taught in school is immoral, do they have the right to take their kid out of school? If the majority thinks X is immoral, can the law punish X? Utopias sometimes sidestep the question by having everybody agree with some fundamental principles (sometimes handwaved by refering to "better education").