quote:According to your answers, your political philosophy is: left-liberal
Your Personal issues Score is 70%. Your Economic issues Score is 30%.
Left-Liberals generally embrace freedom of choice in personal matters, but support central decision-making in economics. They want the government to help the disadvantaged in the name of fairness. Liberals tend to tolerate social diversity, but work for what they might describe as "economic equality."
Look for me on the grid - I'm exactly one-half a box from the left border of center.
quote: According to your answers, your political philosophy is: libertarian
Your Personal issues Score is 90%. Your Economic issues Score is 60%.
Libertarian Libertarians support a great deal of liberty and freedom of choice in both personal and economic matters. They believe government's only purpose is to protect people from coercion and violence. They value individual responsibility, and they tolerate economic and social diversity.
posted
I remember the last time this was linked (not being obnoxious here, just stating the observation). Nearly everybody came up at least somewhat libertarian. On a quiz on a libertarian website. Go figure.
Posts: 13680 | Registered: Mar 2002
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posted
Your Personal issues Score is 90%. Your Economic issues Score is 40%.
No surprise there. But yes, the quiz is extremely biased, just look at their descriptions of the different sides. Libertarian sounds awfully good from that doesn't it Posts: 3295 | Registered: Jun 2004
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Boon
unregistered
posted
I'm rather surprised I didn't score pretty far to the right. What's that say about me?
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quote:Question, how come conservatives are considered "right" and liberals are considered "left"? And right and left of what?
Goes as follows : At the very start of the French Revolution, while Louis XVII was still in power, he called a meeting of the Estates General for the first time in ~300 years. There were three estates : Nobility, clergy, and peasants, and they were seated from left to right (relative to the King's seat) thus : Peasants, clergy, nobility. Since there was a fairly exact correlation between how poor the delegates were, and how much they wanted reform, the left-right division was useful : The people on the left were likely to support (indeed demand) tax reform, abolition of various privileges, and general modernisation of the state.
A few days later the Estates General broke up over the issue of whether voting should be by estate or by delegate, and a rump of it formed the National Assembly, which essentially consisted of the peasants. This ended any usefulness of the left-right scale, since the National Assembly had no such structure. (For a while there was an up-down scale, as the radicals took seats high up in the tennis court in which they met). However, because it is so easily grasped, even by American journalists, the left-right divide remains with us.
Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
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quote: Your Personal issues Score is 20%. Your Economic issues Score is 60%.
According to your answers, your political philosophy is: right-conservative
Conservative Right-conservatives favor freedom of choice on economic issues, but want official standards in personal matters. They tend to support the free market, but frequently want the government to defend the community from what they see as threats to morality or to the traditional family structure.
That would mostly be me.
Posts: 2208 | Registered: Feb 2004
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quote: According to your answers, your political philosophy is: left-liberal.
Left-Liberals generally embrace freedom of choice in personal matters, but support central decision-making in economics. They want the government to help the disadvantaged in the name of fairness. Liberals tend to tolerate social diversity, but work for what they might describe as "economic equality."
Your Personal issues Score is 80% Your Economic issues Score is 40%
This is interesting. I thought I'd come out as centrist; that's how I think of myself.
However...high fives to sndrake and pooka. This put me just left of centrist, as well.
Posts: 2454 | Registered: Jan 2003
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quote:5: IS THE QUIZ A TRICK? …AND OTHER CRITICISMS OF, AND QUESTIONS ABOUT, THE QUIZ Isn't this just a trick to get people to score "libertarian" -- even if they're not libertarians at all -- so they'll think they're libertarians and support libertarian causes?
That's an instant reaction of some people when they first encounter the Quiz. And it's an understandable one. (It's good to be skeptical.)
But the answer is no. The Quiz is not a trick, and it's not designed to produce false libertarian scores.
It would be very easy to produce a Quiz in which lots of people who weren't libertarians or libertarian-leaning nevertheless scored libertarian. In fact, it's very easy to take the 10 questions on the Quiz, reword them, and create a Quiz on which virtually everyone will score libertarian -- or, alternately, a version in which no one will.
It's much harder to come up with a short, fast Quiz that gives accurate scores, and new political insights, to the vast majority of takers. But that has been our goal from the beginning -- because there are very good reasons for NOT wanting a Quiz in which non-libertarian-leaning people score libertarian.
Here's why:
1) If the Quiz were obviously fake, routinely giving phony and inaccurate scores, people would simply ignore it. Our goal of changing the political map to include libertarians and others would never be accomplished. From the start, we've realized that the Quiz must be accurate if it (and most importantly, the idea of a multi-spectrum political map) is to be taken seriously by scholars, journalists, teachers, and others as a tool of political analysis. Liberals must score liberal, conservatives conservative, libertarians libertarian, etc.
It's because it is so accurate that the Quiz model is today being taken seriously by more and more opinion leaders.
2) People who are momentarily tricked into defining themselves as "libertarians" aren't going to be very happy when they find they've been deceived. People don't like to feel they've been tricked or used. A deceptive Quiz in which non-libertarians consistently scored "libertarian" would win libertarians more enemies, not friends. And it would put more ammunition into the hands of our enemies. It certainly wouldn't benefit the libertarian movement.
3) A Quiz in which almost everyone scored libertarian would be enormously wasteful of the limited resources of libertarian activists and the various libertarian groups who use the Quiz as outreach, to identify libertarians and libertarian-leaning people. These groups want a tool that will "filter out" poor prospects (i.e., persons not open to libertarian ideas), and that will let them quickly identify those people most receptive to libertarian ideas. A Quiz in which conservatives, liberals, moderates, socialists and so on scored libertarian or libertarian-leaning would be worthless for outreach.
4) A softcore Quiz in which virtually everyone scored libertarian would devalue or dumb-down the word "libertarian," making it almost meaningless. The Advocates has always emphasized the importance of presenting the full, uncompromising libertarian philosophy to the public, and it would be counter to this goal for us to publicize a Quiz that watered down the meaning of "libertarian."
Incidentally, one proof that the Quiz isn't designed to make many or most people score libertarian is obvious: most people who take the Quiz DON'T score libertarian. The percentage of libertarian scores seems to match very nicely the 20%-30% estimates from various sources of how much of the American population is libertarian or libertarian-leaning. In September 2000, Rasmussen Research, one of the leading poll companies in America, administered the Quiz to a cross-sampling of Americans and found that 16% scored libertarian. Obviously, if the Quiz is designed to make most people score libertarian, we've done a pretty a pretty lousy job of it.
Also, if you define yourself as a conservative or liberal based on one of the Major Issues (abortion, death penalty) but have leanings in the other direction the test will reflect that, as those questions are not dealt with in the quiz because...
quote:It's not easy choosing the right questions. Three examples:
Gun control. The early Quizzes contained this question: "Citizens should be allowed to own handguns" in the personal liberty section. Then someone pointed out that, in order to score perfectly as a leftist or liberal, you would have to answer "yes" to that question. Yet obviously, in the real world, many if not a majority of liberals and leftists favor significant amounts of gun control, if not outright gun bans. So the question threatened the integrity of the test. So, even though we consider the issue a very important one, and a strong indicator of one's political leanings, we reluctantly dropped it, in order to keep the Quiz scores accurate.
Abortion. Abortion was omitted because of the considerable disagreement among people of all political persuasions -- including libertarians -- on the issue. Though a very important political issue, it simply isn't a determinant of whether or not one is a libertarian or liberal or conservative.
Death penalty. This is another very important political issue, but again, it isn't a determinant of whether one is or is not a liberal, conservative, libertarian, etc. Therefore there's no insight to be gained by including it on the Quiz.
And...
quote:My score says I'm a _______, yet I know that's not true! I'm really a _______! So isn't the Quiz flawed?
Reports from people who take the Quiz tell us the vast majority of people feel their scores are accurate. Many people find new insights about their political beliefs when they take the Quiz.
However, a small percentage of people don't feel their score is accurate. Why? Reasons vary, but for at least some of them, we think it's because they have given themselves a label that doesn't reflect the views of most people who wear that label.
The Quiz assumes that conservatives/those on the right are in favor of free markets, free trade, lower taxes and the like. It assumes that liberals/leftists favor free speech, no draft, no restrictions on sex between consenting adults, and so on.
Obviously, while a good guideline this isn't always true.
posted
Yes, that quiz is biased, though its not biased as obviously as it could be.
Just to hit on a few:
quote:End "corporate welfare." No government handouts to business
Really loaded language, obviously.
quote:Let people control their own retirement; privatize Social Security
Again, incredibly loaded language.
quote:Replace government welfare with private charity
You guessed it, more loaded language.
I hit the economic examples where it was most obvious, but in the social examples there are clear biases inherent in the questions as well, though more through partial agreement problems, such as here:
quote:Repeal laws prohibiting adult possession and use of drugs
And just clearly awfully worded statements:
quote:There should be no laws regarding sex for consenting adults
(you mean laws shouldn't prohibit people from having sex in public places?)
The quiz is biased, and particularly on the economic questions laughably so.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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posted
"Actually, even though the quiz is on a libertarian website, it isn't biased."
The quiz is REMARKABLY biased. I mean, it's probably one of the most biased political surveys out there, to the point where I've seen it used in classes as an example of how biased questions can produce a desired response.
That its authors -- the people seeking to use it as effective propaganda -- insist it isn't biased does not mean that we have to take their word for it. Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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I'm just left of the libertarian axis... Economic Left/Right: -2.00 Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -5.28
Posts: 2432 | Registered: Feb 2001
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quote:According to your answers, your political philosophy is: left-liberal
Left-Liberal Left-Liberals generally embrace freedom of choice in personal matters, but support central decision-making in economics. They want the government to help the disadvantaged in the name of fairness. Liberals tend to tolerate social diversity, but work for what they might describe as "economic equality."
Economic Left/Right: -6.88 Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -4.00
I don't think this score is that far from the equivalent in the first quiz. It also has too many forced choices, with no middle choice of "sometimes" or "it depends."
Maybe political novices take the first quiz and get led by the questions, but I think I (and a lot of Hatrackers) were savvy enough to ignore the bias of certain questions and just report our stance on a given question.
Posts: 4344 | Registered: Mar 2003
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posted
On this second one, I was once again exactly on the line between left and right, but this time I was barely on the side of the liberatarians, instead of seriously over there as in the liberatarian quiz.
Posts: 16551 | Registered: Feb 2003
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posted
on the first one, it said I was a centralist. On the second one, it said I was a libertarian leftist of (-4, -2.26) in the general area of Gandhi and Mandela.
I can't imagine that either are terribly accurate. the first one was WAY too short, and the second one's wording was too extreme or generalized (some using words like "all" or "none" and others using words like "usually" or "closely") to make a fair and more accurate quiz. Also the second one didn't allow for an "eh" or "dunno" or "don't care" option.
Posts: 298 | Registered: Sep 2004
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That's a bit of an exageration of my standpoints, though, because I could tell exactly what the loaded questions wanted me to say so I shot them all down.
I think the only thing that quiz proved is that I am not a libertarian.
Posts: 8504 | Registered: Aug 1999
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Economic Left/Right: -5.88 Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -7.90
Which, as it turns out is (according to their chart) more or less in Dalai Lama territory, only I was a little closer to being an anarchist than he is.
I think that the first quiz, which put me just left of centrist, was more accurate of where I feel myself to be. Although my friends tend to call me a "philosophical anarchist" sometimes. Posts: 2454 | Registered: Jan 2003
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quote: quote: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sex outside of marriage is usually immoral. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"usually?" Okay, if some fiend is going to kill your family if you don't screw them and you actually believe their pirate's honor... sheesh.
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