The Center For American Progress has a terrific new survey out on political ideology. The material in the survey is right up our alley, and is probably deserving of several posts, but I want to start with a relatively quick, 30,000-foot question: ideologically speaking, is there more that unites us as Americans or divides us?
The CAP survey posed 40 political and ideological statements to a group of 1,400 American adults, and asked them whether or not they agreed with them. You can answer the questions for yourself here; they cover a wide range of topics in the areas of economic and domestic policy, foreign affairs, societal and "values" issues, and the proper role of government. Although benchmark surveys of political ideology are nothing new, this is one of the most comprehensive and best-constructed efforts that I've seen.
But let's not worry too much about precisely what those questions were for now -- we'll look at that in a subsequent post. Let's simply take the answers to all 40 questions and plot them on a graph. On the vertical axis, we'll plot the percentage of self-described conservatives that agreed with a particular statement, and on the horizontal axis, the percentage of self-described progressives and liberals who did the same. (The CAP survey included separate categories for "progressive" and "liberal", which is another thing we'll look at sometime soon, but I've combined their answers for the time being). This is what we get when we do that:
If you're having trouble picking up on a pattern in that data, that's because there isn't one. The correlation between the fraction of conservatives and the fraction of liberals agreeing to a given question is essentially zero.
Is this surprising? Perhaps. If conservatives and liberals had fundamental disagreements on most major political questions, you'd expect to see a statistically significant inverse correlation in their responses. But you don't see that. Conversely, if they agreed on most of these fundamental questions, with the differences being only around the periphery, you'd expect to see a statistically significant positive correlation in their responses. But you don't really see that either.
Rather, it seems there's about as much that unites us as divides us. And although it's possible that this result is just an artifact of the particular questions that CAP posed, for some reason it feels like the "right" answer. Americans like appeals to bipartisanship and post-ideological politics -- but they also like good, old-fashioned partisan red meat. We're a complicated country, and we have complicated politics.
3.11.2009
A Nation Neither United Nor Divided
@ 8:06 PM
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Oops, had comments off there for a sec. Should be fixed now.
My 366/400 puts me way off the chart.
Interesting that the bottom-left quadrant is so vacant... but that must just be an artefact of the questions being more likely to insight "agree" tendencies than "disagree" tendencies.
Huh. I wonder if there's any way to break up the questions into sub-categories to see if there's a non-random trend in the 'values' questions, or the 'role of government' questions or something. There might be too few of them to get anything meaningful about trends, though.
Interesting results. I wonder if we'd see correlations if we corrected for something else, like regional differences (e.g. somebody living in Alabama who describes himself as "progressive" might actually be considered "conservative" on a more universal scale). Actually, that leads to another interesting question - is this lack of correlation simply an artifact of how we define ourselves? Do most people believe very differently, and just define themselves as liberal or conservative in a way that's inconsistent with their answers to these questions?
Probably not, but it could be interesting :)
Also, Nate, you have "save" in the paragraph above the chart, where it should be "same."
I see Patrick Star, with his head pointing up along the agree-agree diagonal. :D
I think that the bottom left being mostly empty would suggest an actual 1 dimensional continuum! Although that could be very easily bias in the question creation/choice if the question designers were themselves thinking in that 1-dimension continuum.
I'd be interested more in this, Nate, if the self labeling was more like a Likert type scale like the individual responses in the survey were. I suspect that if we did that and then correlated the results of the survey with the scale of political identification we would see an inverse correlation. Another interesting question would be to simply have more self labeling possibilities: ie Socialist, Very Progressive, Progressive, Liberal Hawk, Independent Moderate, Democratic Moderate, Republican Moderate, Conservative, Social Conservative, Economic Conservative, NeoCon and Libertarian.
I'm hoping you will be able to explore these questions.
It looks like there are very few things both libs/cons disagree on (3)but about a third of the issues they do agree (13). Another third (13)are mostly conservative positions and a little less than a third (11) are mostly liberal. Could prove to be a 24 question quiz to determine political positions.
Nate, I don't know whether you have information in the survey to do this, but normally one would expect sharper differences among the "political sophisticated" segment of the population.
It would be valuable -- if you can do it -- to run those same graphs and correlations separately for those who are "sophisticated" vs. those who are not. As a proxy for political sophistication, it's common to use education and/or level of interest in politics.
A great example of how poorly correlation can be interpreted when applied in the inappropriate context. The more appropriate explanation is that the range of statements included in the survey showed no systemic bias.
On the other hand, a rather more useful way of analysing the chart would be to identify the statements that fall into the four quadrants. Statements in the top left identify conservatives, bottom right identify liberals, and top right are things that both can agree on.
How about posting an analysis of those clusters of statements and seeing if we can find some common ground to move forward on?
What this also could suggest is that there are more than two distinct view points on the 40 political and ideological questions. What would be interesting looking at the data to see if there is a finite number of obvious "view point groups" as this would be indicative of shadow political party identification (identification with parties that don't exist).
It does raise an interesting conundrum that's always puzzled me: Most people, regardless of political persuasion, live their lives conservatively, responsibly, and compassionately. Their micro views favor rewarding accomplishment and ambition, while also being fair-minded and choosing to share their good fortune with the less fortunate. They have largely functional logical and analytical minds even though most have vanilla educations. Yet, within that context, it puzzles me how some can be so politically liberal.
Ha, this was fun. My score of 334 makes me "extremely progressive". Of course, these same opinions mean that in Sweden I vote for the second most conservative party.
Fun fact: according to their results, liberals are more progressive than progressives are.
I've taken many quizzes like this before, and I've often thought that Americans can learn a lot more about the international political spectrum if we were able to take quizzes like this from different countries.
It would show that America is, without doubt, the most conservative 1st world nation on earth. While my score of 330 on this past quiz makes me extremely liberal here, I would venture I am center/left at furthest in Western Europe, S. America or the Pacific Rim. Good perspective to have.
I'm not too satisfied with the phrasing of many of the questions. There didn't seem to be a strong underlying bias, but about a third of the questions made me want to give two very different answers depending on my interpretation.
At 329, it's pretty clear where I'm at, though. Hi Linda!:-)
I only got a 323. Thought it would be over 350.
Linda said...
"Ha, this was fun. My score of 334 makes me "extremely progressive". Of course, these same opinions mean that in Sweden I vote for the second most conservative party."
Same here with a score of 338 (although I vote for only the third most conservative party in Canada). I think there are very few countries other than the US where the average score would be 200.
A score of 302 still makes me extremely progressive, but hey I didn't always choose the most progressive option.
Interesting, with a score of 98 I am not a conservative as I thought.
Too many times, political views are addressed in simply a linear fashion - how far left or right. Most issues, including most of the 40 questions have nuances that can't be simply put on a scale of Agree More or Agree Less.
the scale of agreement is very different though, with conservatives closer to the mean - is that meaningful?
The question about the purpose of corporations is one that I have trouble with. Certainly, they should provide returns for shareholders, and, just as certainly, their pupose in general isn't to make the world a better place. But what about employees?
And even if making the world better is a lofty a goal for, say, a carwash, there still needs to be a system in place to insure that it doesn't make the world worse (by washing waste oil into storm drains, for instance).
The terrorism question was odd, too. I want people to do all they can to stop terrorism. I just don't think a policy of torture does that. And I want the option of military intervention in some cases, but in general it's a crappy option.
Does welfare remove incentives to work? Sometimes, yes. So welfare needs to be reformed to incorporate incentives to work.
Etc.
Dale
Dude! 98?
Assuming you can restrain yourself from going ballistic in a room full of bleeding heart commies, I'd like to see your opinions.
Your y-axis label spells "Agreeing" wrong.
270/400. I guess I'm not the big liberal defender of freedom I thought I was!
John is correct. The graph tells us about the value of each question for identifying who is Conservative vs. Liberal/Progressive. A different survey that contained only questions from Quadrants I and III would lead to a conclusion that there is no agreement between these groups.
337/400
though I had a tendency to put a 10 if i was past 6, and there were some I wanted to put a 15
Hu Chi
Too many opinions to mention all here.
One non-linear issue is Free Trade: I'm generally against free trade agreements, but not because of the lost jobs argument.
Most free trade agreements give up US sovereignty. The agreements usually call for disputes to be resolved by unelected people appointed, in part, by foreign governments. I want Americans to vote and decide on American issues (even if they don't always do so the way I think they should).
I think this site is great (the analysis and 'civil' comments anyway). I constantly challenge my views and where else should I do it but the heart of the beast's lair?
98?! That is serious concrete bunker/tin-foil hat territory there.
Dale, is your last name Gribble by any chance?
To many of the questions, my answer was either zero or ten. If I were someone who was reluctant to disagree with people or to stand out as having personal views, many of those zeros and tens might have been threes and sevens. The analogy might be that zeros and tens are a bit like "Hell no!" or "Hell yes!" while threes and sevens are just "No" and "Yes".
Thus, differences in personality and temperament may yield different scores among people who may not have different positions. One would expect commenters on this site to have either higher or lower scores than average, since they wouldn't post comments if they didn't feel strongly one way or another.
Charlie
My real name is Rusty Shackleford, but don't tell anyone.
Dale
I'm not unsympathetic to your points on trade, and tend to be somewhat protectionist. Sending jobs overseas to take advantage of cheap labor robs Americans of jobs and makes sweatshops overseas.
Still, I'm no isolationist, and as far as US sovereignty is concerned I lament the absence of a body that can enforce environmental laws on a global scale--not that the establishment of such a body would be an easy task.
As a minor character in the "beast's lair", I'm still flattered by your characterization. It's kind of a warm, fuzzy beast, don't you think?
Oh man and I thought politicalcompass.org was hard to choose between. This place gives you 11 degrees.
I don't buy it. I think this only shows that they did a good job at designing the set of questions for this survey.
For examply, they clearly designed their survey to get roughly equal numbers of questions for which you would expect to get a YES answer from conservatives, liberals/progressives, or both. That's how I would design it. In fact, I would pick questions that are least correlated with each other, so you would expect to get a wide spread in this graph.
Now, given that you've shown that they used a nicely diverse set of questions (but only that), I would love to see a PCA analysis of how the individuals responded on these questions. There's nothing in the graph you posted here that would preclude having two clearly divided clusters of respondents.
307/400. That probably makes me pretty middle-of-the-road for the rest of the world.
The survey seemed very slightly biased--or perhaps "leading" is a somewhat better term. There were a few double-barreled questions and others weren't phrased very well. The survey probably wouldn't have made it out the door of the research center at which I work, and we're all practically a bunch of socialists who writhe in agony every time we have to evaluate yet another abstinence education program. Still, the response distributions indicate a good level of face validity. I certainly got a score I expected. Interesting stuff. Would be fun to be on the team that prepares these sorts of surveys.
Hu Chi- "Still, I'm no isolationist, and as far as US sovereignty is concerned I lament the absence of a body that can enforce environmental laws on a global scale--not that the establishment of such a body would be an easy task."
The global scale part scares me. Since the body would obviously have to be made up of members of other, often corrupt, countries, how would we legitimize that body's binding decisions on the US?
Just look at the folks appointed to some of the UN committees. If Americans didn't elect them (or directly elect the person that appoints them), we are allowing someone else to decide what is best for us. The ballot box is our only recourse for bad decisions. I don't believe in enlightened despots.
Without adequate justification, this is probably a bad way to go statistically and I didn't check the data to verify my hunch but.....
It looks like if you split the data into two groups, you see strong correlation in both, and significant separation.
All the estimates below are approximate.
Lets call all the point in group 1, the points that are greater than the line y=x, and all the points in group 2 all the points that are less than the line y=x. Then all the points in group 1 seem to line up along the line y = x + 15% and all the points in group 2 seem to line up along y = x - 25%.
It seems we could label group 1 "conservative questions", and group 2 "liberal questions". In other words, there is correlation is both groups, but one cluster is much more likely to elicit conservative agreement, and the other is much more likely to elicit liberal agreement.
The fact that hardly any points fall in quadrant III indicates, the binary ideological divide of the questions. Either conservatives or liberals are likely to say yes to any particular question on the survey.
As I've noted, this division may be cheating without a solid statistical rational, but I wouldn't be surprised if when data points are labeled, we find that question types cluster around these two groups.
Blah I'm going to post anyway even though my idea is the same as the one above
Nate,
There is analysis you can do I would argue the country is fairly split and partisan. Equal opinion would have the dots clustered along a diagonal line from 0,0 to 100,100. Instead it appears that there are two partisan splits. The consverative +20 conservative issues fall on the diagonal line going from 0,20 to 80,100. The liberal/progressive +20 liberal/progressive issues diagonal line goes from 20,0 to 100,80.
I got 204 still stuck in the middle :-p. Any politician worth their salt should go after the top right questions. Odd that there are none in the bottom left. (seems people want to do something in most cases/reacted strongly) Be careful of bias since its sponsored by center for american progress. (See simple political quiz sponsored by libertarians having overly libertarian results)
Looking forward to more posts.
@ Rudy:
I had to laugh. I could almost have written: "Most people, regardless of political persuasion, live their lives liberally, responsibly, and compassionately. Their micro views favor rewarding accomplishment and ambition, while also being fair-minded and choosing to share their good fortune with the less fortunate. They have largely functional logical and analytical minds even though most have vanilla educations. Yet, within that context, it puzzles me how some can be so politically conservative."
The lesson here, I think, is that the values you think of as 'conservative' are actually part of the common ground in the top right. The big contrasts come in attitudes toward the disadvantaged (i.e. is it their own fault or not) and externalities (should they be regulated or not). Neither of those shows up in the daily life of the vast majority of either liberals or conservatives who participate in public discourse, because most of us don't live among the disadvantaged and don't personally track or create the major externalities.
Politeness, caring, responsibility, and a sense of fairness are nonpartisan.
Dale
Your concerns are valid ones. My point was that if pollution is global then the solution to it should be global. How we get there from here is anything but obvious, and fraught with problems as you point out.
Your general point about sovereignty could just as easily have been made by states that resisted joining the union, and would still have been valid, but only up to a point.
The increasingly brown sunsets we get in Oregon are due to Chinese coal burning. Is it their sovereign right to do it?
My idealogical score is 321/400. This makes me extremely progressive, not to mention incredibly sexy.
BTW, I love the word progressive. Liberal sounds outdated, rigid and boring.
It seems to me the the questions are divided into two sets (one with an x-intercept of 30% and the other with an x-intercept of 75%) that each have a roughly linear correlation. Perhaps this indicates distinct categories of questions in which liberals were more likely to strongly agree or disagree with on average? My first thought is issues related to hot-button social freedoms (marriage rights, abortion, privacy) in the 30% category. Perhaps, as such, there is correlation after all.
First time contributor, long-time and much appreciative reader,
johnofchisane
THE SUPERHERO QUIZ - Which Superhero are you?
http://www.thesuperheroquiz.com/
Apparently, I'm Spider-Man. I would have said Batman myself, but anyway:
I'm intelligent, witty, a bit geeky and have great power and responsibility
SUPERHERO SCORE:
Spider-Man 75%
Robin 65%
The Flash 65%
Catwoman 65%
Superman 55%
Green Lantern 55%
Batman 50%
Hulk 50%
Supergirl 45%
Wonder Woman 40%
Iron Man 40%
Porridge
I'm guessing there are a lot of Spider-Men on this site. I was hoping for Green Lantern, personally.
Spider-Man
80%
Green Lantern
70%
Superman
55%
Iron Man
55%
Supergirl
52%
Hulk
50%
The Flash
45%
Robin
35%
Batman
30%
Wonder Woman
27%
Catwoman
25%
Like a lot of the people posting here, my score was well up in the 300s. And I didn't post all tens and zeros either, in fact very few of either one. So their summary chart by groups surprised me by showing the highest median score ("liberal Democrats") at around 270. Are 538 readers that far to the left? From the mostly sensible, well informed and reasoned comments I read here, I would have thought we were a lot closer to the mainstream. I think the people who have mentioned that the medians would have been hugely higher in a place like Sweden are exactly right. I hope the CAP is right that we are finally moving in that direction.
@ Dale -
You said:
"Most free trade agreements give up US sovereignty. The agreements usually call for disputes to be resolved by unelected people appointed, in part, by foreign governments. I want Americans to vote and decide on American issues (even if they don't always do so the way I think they should)."
That is exactly how I feel about corporate power. Yet conservatives don't seem to mind unelected people controlling our lives if it's in the service of a corporation.
> Most free trade agreements give up US sovereignty. The agreements usually call for disputes to be resolved by unelected people appointed, in part, by foreign governments. I want Americans to vote and decide on American issues (even if they don't always do so the way I think they should).
You might find it interesting to note that sovereignty was/in a core reason for the "left" side of Canada's political spectrum doesn't like these trade agreements. There is a pretty base concern, if not outright fear, of US political influence for a large portion of the Canadian population. It isn't so much hate, and your positives do not go unnoticed. It is more to do with an aversion to the negatives that come with how you do things and how you handle yourselves.
At least the English speaking part. The Francophones generally just despise you, their phobia is cultural dilution by the Anglophones. *shrug*
zosima and johnofchisane - Yes, if you draw a line through the middle of an uncorrelated set of points, you will tend to see a correlation in each half, and the two halves will be (obviously) well separated.
That's entirely an artifact of drawing that line in the first place though. Note that you could draw the diagonal in the other direction (y = 100% - x), and you would get a negative correlation.
There are ways to test whether a distribution shows two or more significant clusters, but not the way you tried to do it. And you may very well get a different answer depending on how you define "cluster".
Again, I think any structure you see here is merely due to the design of the survey questions. Yes, there are few questions in the lower quadrant - that's because all the questions were phrased as statements that some segment of their audience was expected to agree with. So no statements that almost everyone would disagree with. Likewise, the statements were chosen to be somewhat controversial. So no statements that almost everyone feels lukewarm about (middle of the graph).
I'm 340, "extremely progressive," which works because if the U.S. were a parliamentary system, I'd always be voting for Social Democratic or Green parties. Ideologically, I'm in about the same place as Senator Bernie Sanders, Congressman Jerrold Nadler, and the late Senator Paul Wellstone, may his memory be for a blessing.
320/400
Which I find amusing since I have certain views which would get me tossed out of both major parties.
Not that I would care, since I think that not banning political parties was the founding fathers greatest blunder.
Many wanted to but didn't and inevitably joined parties because of the very thing they feared.
Disclaimer: I didn't look at the questions.
Maybe the good (though not terribly surprising) news is that there exist dots in the upper-right corner. Sure, the poll might have been designed that way, but sometimes it feels like Left and Right don't agree on anything, and it's good to remind people that this isn't true.
The emptiness of the bottom-left quadrant is probably because the pollsters didn't want to bother to ask questions that clearly no one would agree with, like "The U.S. government should bomb Ireland" or "It would be a good thing if China invaded the United States."
I'm not sure, but it looks to me like, if you separate the data from the right of the blue line and the data from the left of the blue line into two separate data sets, they might both have relatively strong positive correlations.
I'm not sure what that means or why you would do that, but it's just a thought.
My Score
Toggle the 'Political Philosophy' Switch to see a graphical representation which you can post here.
I was a 344! Besides Raphaeladidas, I am the most progressive.
I guess my father was right; I am a hippy.
Statler:
My score on that political philosophy survey was exactly the same as yours. And with more detail:
Personal Questions: Liberals and libertarians agree in choosing the less-government answers, while conservatives and populists agree in choosing the more-restrictions answers.
Economic Questions: Conservatives and libertarians agree in choosing the less-government answers, while liberals and populists agree in choosing the more-restrictions answers.
You scored the following on the PoliticsMatch questions:
Personal Score 95%
Economic Score 18%
Where You Fit In
Where your Personal score meets your Economic score on the grid below is your political philosophy. Based on the above score, you are a Hard-Core Liberal.
381. Guess I'm an outlier even here. :-)
Or more likely, I was taking the survey at 2am, which made me more likely to answer "hell yes/no" than I might have been otherwise.
Paul from Santa Fe: Are 538 readers that far to the left? From the mostly sensible, well informed and reasoned comments I read here, I would have thought we were a lot closer to the mainstream.
The mainstream is further to the left than is generally acknowledged. But I suspect it's also that people who are involved enough in politics to be participating here are more likely to firmly believe in their positions (0's and 10's), not because they're rigid, but because they're know enough about the issue that they're not figuring out their answer on the fly.
That survey is seriously miscalibrated. It rates me as extremely progressive, and I'm center-right.
"That survey is seriously miscalibrated. It rates me as extremely progressive, and I'm center-right."
Of course it is - it is a survey put out by a group with a strong incentive to claim that most Americans are liberals. It is no different in that respect than that quiz the Libertarians have circulated for years (which finds a plurality of people to be libertarian).
That is why, for instance, they have some really crappy analysis on why the country is more "progressive" that compares 1988 and 2008 election results (does that mean we are less progessive than in 1996).
Consider a few things:
1. The quiz does not address issue salience. I may have strong support the death penalty, yet it might also not be a big issue for me.
2. The survey does not include a weighted balance of social, foreign and economic issues. I scored a 157, for instance, although I answered as liberal as I could on every social issue question.
3. The quiz uses slanted wording. "should we reduce poverty even if it means higher taxes ON THE WEALTHY". Another question asked whether one supported "IMPOSING DEMOCRACY", and gave Iraq as an example of this, as opposed to say, Japan or Germany.
4. Some of the questions were rather irrelevant to the progressive-conservative divide. The best example of this was the question of whether the government should focus more on things at home or abroad. There is certainly a tradition of both on the American right and left.
Nate
Now you know who you're audience is. Heh, heh.
jonathan
Don't kid yourself, man. You're a hard core lefty like the rest of us. Surveys don't lie. Now get out there and kick some right wing ass!
Redshift
You're moving away from everybody else so fast that your score got shifted way left. If you'd stand still for a minute you'd be about a 320-340 like all the other reasonable people (except for Dale, who's blue-shifted to the same degree that you're red-shifted).
@Patrik
Indeed, I prefaced my comment with essentially the same caveats. If I had the time, I would run a cluster analysis. I'm also interested to see the post on which data points correspond to which types of questions.
If the question type divides along these groups, then I think there will be a stronger case to argue for a trend.
Also, it isn't right to say the correlation is entirely because of the division. Dividing the points will generate a stronger correlation in some distributions that in others. For example, if the data were evenly distributed across the plane, dividing the data along y=x wouldn't introduce nearly as strong a correlation.
Moreover, I would guess that the correlation is stronger if you divide on y=x than if you divide on y=-x
Now I'm not saying that any of this is definitely the case, but I think it is a little hasty to say that there is no pattern to these data.
One other note, when I say the "correlation is stronger", technically I'm talking about the magnitude of the correlation.
Jen
If you guess your father was right, you're not a hippy-- unless your father's a hippy, which is groovy.
hoser
Yeah, it's a silly survey, but as a conversation starter it's not too bad. Which superhero are you?
My score is 301/400. In the US I'd consider myself a mainstream liberal Democrat, in Germany I'm rather a slightly conservative leaning moderate and aligning with the CDU.
Well, this just shows how far to the right the US (or- how far to the left Europe) is.
In the VoteMatch test I got 80% social and 32% economic score.
I think that's about right- socially liberal, fiscal moderate, leaning liberal.
Compared with the senators from back then I'm most agreeing with Kohl, Kerry, Reed, Daschle and Durbin, and least with Smith (R-NH), Graham, Roberts, Stevens and Bunning. Yeah, disagreeing with the insane nuts. Fine with me.
I was very put off by the conservative frame to the questions. Hu Chi I guess you noticed this too.
My guess that any person who is used to reacting negatively to such frames would get the over 300 score (mine was 351 and 367 when I went back and wrote down all the questions.)
One that amused me was "it is unpatriotic to criticize our government leaders in time of war". That one has given me whiplash trying to follow the GOP on this. Impeaching Clinton as he went into Bosnia, the hysteria about mild concern about Iraq, and now another head snapping call for violent insurgency against Obama.
One could do an entire Nate Silver/George Lakoff column on every one of the questions, and I would expect that any reality based Web Aware person to score over 300 just on that alone, quite aside from their natural right/left proclivities.
Rudy,
Consumer debt is 100% of our GDP. we do NOT live our lives conservatively.
People who live their lives conservatively, if they're in a dual income family, only spend one person's salary on necessities, therefore if either gets laid off, they're still functional.
Born and Bred American Dopes. -- Jas Jain
The average score was 207. Just shows that majority here lean left in some cases way left.
I think there is more disagreement than agreement.
Starting from top right quarter and going clockwise - 1st and 3rd quarters show agreements. 2nd and 4th show disagreements. There are more dots in the 2nd and 4th. None in 3rd.
Ofcourse that could depend on the questions. If there were questions like "do you support hitler's ideas" - there would be many dots in the 3rd quarter.
I think a linear regression is the wrong model for fitting this data. There are almost certainly some issues that everyone will agree on and some that will cause a partisan divide. In that case, I'd expect the data to lie along an X, connecting the four corners. Something more complicated model (unbinned likelihood perhaps?) could tell you the fraction of points associated with a postive or negative correlation. That would then tell you (for this sample of questions) how much we have common vs. partisan values.
Of course, the "for this sample" qualifier is highly important. If you take the sample and add 10 questions about abortion, you're almost certain to see a sizable jump in the apparent degree of partisanship.
Wow, and I thought my 344 was off the charts till I came to the comments. Oh well, if nothing else I can balance the other Dale. Of course, what I REALLY want to know is, what is Nate's score?
Nate, that was fun. I got a 351 which makes me an extremely progressive. But that wasn't quite a shock. One thing I noticed about myself while taking the test was that when it came to the progressive/liberal statements I agreed with them 100% but when it came to most of the conservative statements I would nudge my numbers back a bit, seeing more shades of grey than I think my Bizarro-twin would. I know there has been scientific studies that show that most people with a conservative mindset tend to follow strict authoritarian figures and who tend to see things in either/or and black and white answers. Progressives and liberals on the other hand tend to question all statements and leaders and don't see the answers to problems as either/or but rather a combination of both. I think the nation's desire for bipartisanship is the nation's way of saying that it's moving in a more progressive direction. I think the nation has evaluated that the "Either you're with us or against us" is not them at this time. Either/or way of thinking gives the American people soundbites and bumpersticker slogans while parsing the shades of grey can't by their nature be reduced to those terms. The last election and the inability of the Republicans to gain any sort of traction against President Obama show that for now American 'pendulum' is moving towards the left. How long that swing will last lies solely on the performance of our President. How you will be able to tell that the swing has stopped is when the right can effectively use soundbites and bumpersticker slogans to convey complex problems.
Interestingly enough the only question that fell into the middle range was the one on free trade. I notice several other commentators also had problems with that question. I wonder if that is the nature of the topic or if it was the way the question was worded.
Well, that superhero test is obviously biased. I refuse to take any test seriously that does not have Wolverine as an option.
I scored 287 and thought that was high until reading some of these comments! Perhaps the quiz needed a few more nuanced questions on immigration. It's not such a simple issue.
"The global scale part scares me. Since the body would obviously have to be made up of members of other, often corrupt, countries, how would we legitimize that body's binding decisions on the US?"
Well, the liberal answer to that is to use a constitution that severely limits the amount of power that the body has, which is pretty much what we do with the UN as it stands.
I understand and agree with the complaints about sovereignty; that was one of the biggest anti-WTO arguments.
I also thought it was strange that I ended up with 330, "extremely progressive." I'm a practical liberal, more progressive than classical, but I also know that from my political compass results, I tend toward anti-authoritarian anti-capitalist results (even as I'm not actually anti-capitalism, just pro-regulation). For example, the question about corporations' responsibilities: they're legally obligated to make as much money as possible under the law. I have no real problem with that, but I think that it means that the law has to be very clear in protecting the interests of the people as a whole, because corporations can't be charged with that as an inherent condition.
I was also surprised that I ended up so far out there, because I think about the only things that I gave hard answers to were regarding things like gay rights, where I really don't think there's any sort of rational argument against them.
I found some of these questions very hard to answer because of their generality. For example:
African Americans and other minority groups still lack the same opportunities as whites in our country.
The degree to which I agree with this varies widely (probably from 6 to 9) from minority group to minority group.
John and Troy: good analysis, thanks!
My apologies, Mr. Shackleford.
LOL
I scored a 298/400 which labels me as very progressive (or San Francisco Republican). Interesting link Nate.
290/400.
When I saw that my score was considered Very Progressive and was off the comparison chart they linked I was surprised and kind of upset. I consider myself fairly conservative in many areas and thought calling me Very Progressive said weird things about our country.
After reading the comments here I feel much better. I AM more conservative than most of you guys posting.
FYI. I chose 0 or 10 only a few times.
I got a 307. Not too shabby. I like to see myself as a pragmatic progressive, if someone can show me FACTS to why an idea is right, I don't much care if it is a progressive or conservative idea I would like to go with it.
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