The political compass

I recently registered with facebook and, although I do not take it seriously (it's a great tool for networking or perhaps notworking), I did find a few seriously cool widgets. One of these is the Political Compass which supposedly maps your ideology in two dimensions: an economic left-right and a social libertarian-authoritarian. It is basically a test where you have to answer 62 questions with answers in a four-point ordinal scale (strongly agree to strongly disagree). The application has been around a few years now, but the application on facebook added the option of having your friends' scores spatially placed alongside with yours (pictured right). The result I got after taking the test is -3.5 (on a -10 to 10 scale) on the economic dimension and -7.13 (again on a -10 to 10 scale) on the social dimension (that's the spot the arrow points at).

Now my friends know that I love spatial models in political science (although I recognize that they do have limitations). So I was interested in seeing how valid the political compass results are. I thus took two additional politics tests in facebook regarding the 2008 US primaries: the 2008 Election Quiz and Itsmycandidate. The goal of these two tests is to show which candidate is closer to your views. Each has 25 questions ranging across several different issues (abortion, health care, war in Iraq, immigration, global warming, etc). Unlike the Political Compass, however, the answers in the 2008 Election Quiz are binary (support/oppose with a 'don't know' option'). In Itsmycandidate, the answers are on ordinal scale, but it the range differs from question to question.

The first one showed that my views are 100% similar to those of Democratic candidates Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel. My match to other candidates ranged from 80% (Obama) to 5% (Hunter, Tancredo). The second test showed a 61.4% match to Kucinich and 59.6% match to both Gravel and Obama. My match to the others ranged from 56.1% (Clinton) to 1.8% (Hunter, Tancredo). How well these correlate to my Political Compass score? In the Political Compass website we can find how these candidates are mapped (pictured left). According to this, Kucinich and Gravel are the closest candidates to my placement although they are far from being a perfect match. It seems that the more nuanced scaling of Itsmycandidate managed to capture the imperfect nature of the matching (my highest matching score was only 59.6%) but again it matched me fairly well to some candidates (like Obama) who were placed far from me by the Political Compass. In all three tests, however, I was consistently mismatched to the far right candidates.

In any case this shows you that political science can really be fun. I must be really lucky...