Tuesday, February 05, 2008

We'll Keep The Green Flag Flying Here?

Recently I took the Political Compass test. It plots you on Left-Right, Authoritarian-Libertarian axes depending on your answers to their questions. As a guideline, some famous political figures are plotted out here:



Now, my own views came out like this:

pcgraphpng

Holy fuck! I think I just pwned Gandhi! Also, I appear to be Bakunin, or someone.

More seriously, that's not too far from what I thought, but there's a good chance that my results have been pushed slightly to the left and slightly down by two factors:

  1. Some of the questions are clearly designed to test Americans, and don't really help in mapping out British folk.
  2. I suspect that I idealized my political beliefs a bit when answering the questions.
The next bit of analysis, plotting the major British political parties, was where things got interesting:



Like most people, I've never really considered the Green Party. This prompted me to check out their policies. While there are parts of their programme that I'm not really bothered about (No nuclear power? Might have to be a bullet we bite, I'm afraid. No medical testing on animals? Do we *have* perfect simulations of people yet?), a fair few of their other ideas do interest me, to the extent that I'm going to have to find out more, at least.

So, long story short, this could be a solution to the problem of wanting to vote for a non-Labour leftist party that isn't some species of Marxist-Leninism.

2 comments:

TM said...

I got this:
Economic Left/Right: -8.75
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -3.69

Which apparently puts me to the left of Robert Mugabe! But then so is Nelson Mandela.

Anonymous said...

The BNP are on the Left? That sounds wrong, but I haven't looked to closely at their policies.

Especially seems odd that the Liberal Democrats are on the Right.