Friday 12 March 2010

Turning the page on the Political Compass

I'm a big fan of graphs and spreadsheets, this you already knew. I feel that the future can in some ways be saved through the use of these tools, hence my interest in the Political Compass.

I've scoured the internet, seeking out the phrase 'political compass' on Twitter, I've dredged the depths of forums, blogs and blog comments. Over a hundred points in my swarm. The Political Compass has an application on Facebook, its just a repeat of the website quiz, but with the added bonus of showing you where you're friends are on the compass if they too have taken the test.

Here's graph, much like the one I posted on Wednesday, but with more points plotted on it, of the swarm that I've scraped off of the internet. The average point is marked with a star.
It does seem to be a bit biased towards the lower left quadrant, and the spectrum if it was just a line would be one which tilts from lower left to upper right, but about 30 degrees I reckon.

Here's a frequency distribution graph showing the bulges on the Left - Right and Libertarian - Authoritarian spectra:-

I tried to get a bit more balance in my data by going to where I thought I'd find upper left people, the white pride St0rmfr0nt forum, but well, they're a broad church with folk spread out all over the compass. Anyhoo, I've figured out the average point for a couple of the 'constituencies', here you go.

There ain't many authoritarian groups on the compass, the folk on the internet don't really go in for that sort of thing I guess. Then again, I doubt that its even possible to score the same as Hitler or Stalin.

Still, I haven't found any actual politicians or PPCs who've taken the test and published their scores, so why are we stuck with such authoritian parties?

**UPDATE**
I thought I'd given up on this one, but I couldn't stop myself from ploughing through google, and found this comment from WDCRob on a random messageboard:-
The fact that there aren't really any societies in that bottom right corner strongly suggests that it's an unstable place to be in terms of societal evolution.
Its an interesting suggestion for genuinely libertarian political parties. It makes me think of that bit in "A Brief History of Time" where Stephen Hawking claims that life would be impossible in a world whose spatial dimension is other than three. He says that a two dimensional dog would “fall apart along its intestine.”

Maybe WDCRob has a point, the bottom right corner is incompatible with political success.

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