Have you ever wondered how your political beliefs should be labeled? Like, are you a leftist? A conservative? A libertarian? A fascist even? Or, are you confused by the labels and feel that some even contradict one another?
The best test by far in my opinion for determining your political leanings compared with the general population is called the Political Compass. The political compass asks an exhaustive series of questions in six general areas. It then takes your answers and determines where you fall on a left to right economic scale and on a vertical scale measuring social beliefs. The far right of the economic scale represents belief in an unregulated, free market economy, and the extreme left represents belief in a fully controlled command (ie "communist") economy.
-The political compass test divides political beliefs into quadrants and lets people know exactly where they stand in each quadrant (image from know your meme).
The bottom of the vertical social scale represents a libertarian belief in social freedoms to live as one pleases whereas the top represents authoritarian beliefs that the government should control citizen's lives in terms of strict social regulations.
-This chart shows my personal results. By the numbers, I scored -7.0 on the economic left/right scale and -7.13 on the social libertarian/authoritarian scale. This puts me deep into the lower left quadrant, and I would say these results accurately reflect my beliefs (image from politicalcompass.org).
The Political Compass breaks political leanings down into four quadrants and lets test takers know exactly where they stand on each scale by illustrating their results with a dot.
I would encourage as many people as possible to take this test. Not only is it interesting to compare results, but unlike similar tests I believe the results to be quite accurate.
There are various political compass charts (hopefully with accurate data entered to produce the results), that help put your results in perspective.
-This one shows the results of various political figures (image from politicalcompass.org).
-This shows the believed leanings of various European nations (image from know your meme).
-This one is rather interesting if you can read it.
-And finally you have interpretations such as this. "Blame the rich" is accurate for me (image from know your meme).
Hope you enjoyed the article, and I definitely recommend you take the test and share your results.