Political Beliefs Survey

[gusl]

Political Beliefs Survey, via marknau

Interestingly, this quiz puts me on the "left". I think that's because there weren't many questions about markets, subsidies, etc. Note that "left/right" and "pragmatism" are just names to the dimensions found by principal component analysis.

Then again, I'm not really libertarian, I'm just pragmatic. This explains my high "pragmatism" score.

My results

Axis Position
1 left/right -2.9009 (-0.1746)
2 pragmatism +6.9402 (+0.4177)

While the means must be 0, I have no idea what the standard deviation is.

And, by the way, his results suggest that the "Right/Left" dimension accounts for most of the variance, while "Pragmatism". This goes against what one might suppose by taking the "World's Smallest Political Quiz".

here's my results on his 2005 quiz:


I'm kinda average on one axis, but quite an extremist on another (99.7%). But I'm generally anti-war, so I don't know where that comes from.

Comments

[marknau.livejournal.com]

Your plot point is practically right on top of mine, although I am also skeptical about the Iraq war.

It may be that in British politics, there is a strong association between being free-market and being pro-Iraq war. In fact, that may well be the case in American politics as well.

We are abberations.

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

It's like running into someone in the middle of the Sahara.

I think the tendency is for most young / isolated libertarians is to just be anti-establishment, anti-status-quo...

In America, you run into other libertarians, and learn that many of their ideas are idiotic... this way, libertarians can diversify and mature. But if they only have non-libertarians to argue with, then their ideas might never evolve as they would be constantly arguing basic points. Just a theory :-)

Oh, and the point is that this would explain why libertarians outside the US are still in the rebellious-teenager stage.

[rdore.livejournal.com]

Labelling that axis anti-war or pro-war seems pretty foolish to me. If you look at the questions which are correlated to it, the 22 most important question have nothing to do with war. (The first that does is "Sometimes civilians are a legitimate military target.") Even that question doesn't talk much about how willing one should be to go to war, but only what is/isn't acceptable in a war.

[trufflesniffer.livejournal.com]

It doesn't actually mention the Iraq War, just one's opinions of the validity of wars in general.

What I found interesting was that, according to one axis, I'm a Guardian reader (very left-wing), but according to the other, I'm a Daily Telegraph reader (very right-wing)!

I'm in the same quarter as you, but further to the left and closer to the centre on the vertical axis. (I believe, for instance, there are strong psychological reasons for state intervention to equalise wealth, because poverty is - in developed countries - a relative concept to do with rank-comparison, rather than an absolute physiological concept.)

See http://politics.beasts.org/scripts/results?surveyid=919815874
and http://www.politicalsurvey2005.com/scripts/quiz?s=ACOBKAEFCCBDABEDDCADDEBAEDDCDCEBDDBCCDDDEA

[spoonless.livejournal.com]

Looks like they've changed the test a bit since then. But I got +7 pragmatism, and 0 for left/right (both were close to the integer values, but I forget what came after the decimal point...

[chipuni.livejournal.com]

They've definitely changed their test.



Yes, I am a pragmatic leftist.