The CFC-OT Consolidated Political Compass Test (CPCT)

[Tee Kay]

So I heard you like political tests, and I heard you complain about how bad they are.

How about you suggest how we can make a political test to end all political tests?

Suggest questions, results (ideologies - socialism, fascism, liberalism, etc, or scales - eg authoritarian-libertarian) and any other ways political tests can be improved.

 

[Arakhor]

None of which will stop people hating any political test because they didn't like how they were pigeonholed or simply retaking it until being assigned the position that they want in the first place.

 

[Kraznaya]

People like tests which perceive them like they perceive themselves.

 

[Ziggy Stardust]

The perfect test consists of one question: "What is your political affiliation?". Upon answering that question, echo "You're right!"

Given the complexity of the subject, and judging by the results I've seen, I think there's a couple of tests (including the original PC) which aren't too shabby.

 

[emzie]

I've always thought what the original PC needed was scenarios rather than ambiguous questions.

 

[Antilogic]

I like the idea of multiple scales as opposed to the generic left/right divide that doesn't tell you squat. Questions need to be specifically worded (unlike the generic ones in the other thread, I won't repeat them all here).

I think the highest weights should be assigned to core ideology-type questions, so asking "do you agree with X" type questions where X is a short, neutral summary of some political philosophy. No leading questions or over-complicated premises.

 

[madviking]

i like the idea of multiple scales as opposed to the generic left/right divide that doesn't tell you squat. Questions need to be specifically worded (unlike the generic ones in the other thread, i won't repeat them all here).

I think the highest weights should be assigned to core ideology-type questions, so asking "do you agree with x" type questions where x is a short, neutral summary of some political philosophy. No leading questions or over-complicated premises.

'WHACHU THINK OF MAH BOI NOZICK?' would be a very good question, indeed.

 

[Dachs]

People like tests which perceive them like they perceive themselves.

Sure. Doesn't mean that there aren't bad tests.

 

[LucyDuke]

The perfect test consists of one question: "What is your political affiliation?". Upon answering that question, echo "You're right!"

This, mostly, except I think it would be more useful to distill a few meaningless principles rather than a few meaningless words. Who the crap gives a crap what anybody wants to call themselves, I vote with the Water Wagon Pink Broccoli Paint Association, we like to play with dogs and share our soup, BIG DEAL.

Spoiler :

GOOD SOUP, PUNK

 

[Traitorfish]

I tend to find that most existing tests measure public policy rather than actual politics. The PC is probably the best in that does have more questions about principle (the one about whether or not land should be a commodity, for example), but even it still skews towards a "government should do X, yes/no?" format.

(I mean, I get that in practice, that's how most people's politics actually works, but it seems like when we're just dealing with abstract categories we shouldn't feel so limited.)

 

[LucyDuke]

Do you think that's because we just agree on most of the possible questions, or because they'll just never make any difference anyway?

 

[shadowplay]

I always thought this brief (but now outdated) test cut right to the point:

http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/voter

It's the "which person do you shoot?" test.

 

[Mouthwash]

I'm not sure how far necromancy is allowed these days, but this seems like a good attempt at the OP's suggestion:

Here are my results:

The questions are sometimes too ambiguous, but the overall concept is solid. One issue I had is that the linear-cyclical measure doesn't take into account religious eschatology and only asks whether you think humanity is making progress through political evolution or technology. You could also object to the use of the term 'forced allocation', as if it were the opposite of market-driven allocation.

 

[Samson]

I think it is simple: Take all the questions that have been asked here, in the 1st instance you could stick to the polls, then consider all the people who have answered them and their answers and put them into some dimensionality reduction algorithm like PCA or tSNE. The principal dimensions that come out of that are the axis on which we vary. Putting names to these axis will be the difficult bit.

 

[The_J]

You should've necroed one of the long-running political compass tests.

And holy f, that test... the questions boggle my mind.

 

[Birdjaguar]

I'm an Aquarius.

 

[EgonSpengler]

You should've negroed one of the long-running political compass tests.

That's a very funny tupo.

 

[Senethro]

wow that autocorrect

 

[Synobun]

Any test that asks if leftism is moral syphilis should be lauded for its intellectual rigor.

 

[jarred!]

^The site self-describes as right-wing, and the bias was apparent.