The Political Spectrum: A Different Approach
Posted March 19, 2009 · Charles O
My college-level exposure to political science taught me about the political spectrum in terms of a continuum that ranges from left to right.
Effectively, one’s position on social and economic issues were constrained into this left-right continuum, such that if one favored a highly-controlled economy one was on the extreme left, and if one supported a highly unregulated economy, one was on the extreme right. Similarly, on the social dimension, if one was collectivist, one was to the left and if one tended towards individualism, one mapped to the right.
The problem with the transposition of the social and economic aspects onto this one-dimensional continuum is that it does not always provide a consistent snapshot of one’s political portrait. A more accurate approach would be to separate the two dimensions and to represent them by way of a graph with two axes, one for the economic dimension and the other for the social. The Political Compass (http://www.politicalcompass.org) does a good job of representing this idea:
The website also has a test which can help you determine where you fall in the two-dimensional political graph (or, “Political Compass” as they call it). I took the test and placed in the left/libertarian quadrant:
Economic Left/Right: -4.50
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -3.13
And, it appears I’m closer to Nelson Mandela and The Dalai Lama than George W. Bush and Silvio Berlusconi, in political orientation:
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