Here is a interesting but flawed quiz to see where you stand on the political and economic spectrum.
http://www.alan.com/index2.html
I am actually rather solidly on the right and I always considered myself a bit of a libertarian but according to this quiz I scored:

Economic Left/Right: -0.38
Authoritarian/Libertarian: 0.87
This puts me very slightly left on economic issues and just to the authoritarian side of center. I'm not sure I agree with the results but it was an interesting quiz. I think some of the questions are slanted to get a particular answer.

Flaw or no flaw, some of the questions make interesting reading.
Heres where I stand:
Economic Left/Right: -0.63
Authoritarian/Libertarian: -3.64

Roughly the same place as Charles Kennedy and Simon Hughes (who are they? )

I am not sure of my Economic orientation - I would want to disagree a bit on that count!
But Authority-wise I believe I am there more or less.

I've taken this test quite a few times already. I usually get between a -2 and a -3 on both the economic scale and the authoritarian/libertarian scale.

Today I got a -4 on the economic left/right scale and a -2.21 on the authoritarian/libertarian scale.

Economic Left/Right: -2.88
Authoritarian/Libertarian: -1.54

It is very long!

Ace, Charles Kennedy and Simon Hughes are British Liberal Democrats (Leader, and Shadow Home Sec, respectively).

Economic Left/Right: -4.13
Authoritarian/Libertarian: -6.10

I seem to have thrown my lot in with Tony Benn and Ken Livingstone. Best not tell my father - he'd probably disown me!

I think my result would amaze my daughter, she thinks of me as being to the right of Maggie!

It looks like Claire Short is my kind of woman.

Economic Left/Right -1.25
Authoritarian/Libertarian -4.92.

I seem to come in the same sort of area as the political Liberals, or Social & Liberal Democrats, or Liberal Democrats, or whatever they call themselves now. Interesting, because I'd have thought I was a little more to the right economically.

Me and Gandhi seem to be great mates.. minus 3/minus 3

Economic Left/Right: -3.63
Authoritarian/Libertarian: -2.51
Not sure what these mean but I took the quiz anyway.
Not sure if they are good or bad numbers. PF

Strange - but everyone is a Commi here

Wonder whether we (unknowingly) lied about our economic preferences?

Hegley - you are pretty close to anarchy, aren't you?

It would appear to be flawed, but who am I to argue with those with authority?
Economic Left/Right: -3.00
Authoritarian/Libertarian: -2.62
It would be interesting to see dead center answers.

I do love some of the simplistic and slanted questions tho.

A one-party state is better because it avoids all the arguments that delay progress in a democratic political system.
In a civilised society, one must always have people above to obey and people below to command.
A woman's place is in the home.
Education should involve enabling children to develop their own personality.
It's a sad reflection on our society that something as basic as drinking water is now a consumer product.
We'd be better off if companies simply told the truth, rather than spending a fortune on manipulative consumer advertising.

I am apparently the FT moderate - - who knew??

I got Economic Left/Right: 1.38 Authoritarian/Libertarian: 1.13

I came up with-

Economic Left/Right: -4.00
Authoritarian/Libertarian: -6.87

I wasn't too keen on some of the questions and the choice of answers (although some questions were cool as cucumbers!).
Maybe they could have had "neutral" as a reply choice or "moderately" agree or disagree.

Guess this means i'm a leftie in Indiana.

I'm also Gandhi's mate...not a big surprise. Us Libras...

economic left/right= 1.00
authoritarian/libertarian= -1.67

I didn't like some of the questions- many of them made me say, "well, what if this or that happened." Arghh!

This thing strikes me as a load of buncombe. According to the numbers, I am effectively in the same ballpark ideologically as Noam Chomsky, Alexander Cockburn and Ho Chi Minh. Either I'm a lot more liberal than I think I am, or some impostor's been posting some quasi-neocon stuff under my screen ID.

-1.38
-3.49


Coolup, I think you're right about the buncombe, although I don't know what buncombe is. You're cetainly no Cockburn! (But here's my question for you: how many people on the far left do you think answered question number five in the affirmative?)

Buncombe is a road about 1/2 west of my house.

Cool, I have to agree with you that it is strange, as I said, my children would have said that I was far to the right, not to the left.

Flawed yes, but not bunkum I feel. I had two goes and it is more or less consistent. The difference between the two sets is that there were some questions where I wanted to say "dunno" or "depends" and that was not permitted so in one set I put all of those questions to Agree and in the other to Disagree. I scored:

Auth./Lib. -8.36 (-9.08)
Left/Right: -7.50 (-7.75)

This puts me way beyond both 'Red' Ken and Wedgie in the corner of the lower left quadrant. It gets me right in with the anarcho-syndicalists, talk about a blast from the past. People will be expecting me to start running about with a slouch hat, black cape (cloak) and a big round gunpowder bomb next! The good news is that if I look at the reading list at least I am keeping good company: Tom Paine, Chomsky, good old Tariq and Pete Kropotkin no less! A far more amenable crowd by than you get in any of the other quadrants of the graph. The fates protect me that I should ever have to share a quadrant with Joe, Adolph, von Margaret, Miguel or Ayn. Well at least the last two never got hold of a country (yet in the case of Miguel).

Sad little anorak that I am, I have been plotting the results people report on a graph. hegly who's published views are similar to my own is the closest to me (though still far away) as one would expect in a reasonable test and Die Hard who's views are some of the most consistently antithetical to my own is one of those farthest away, also what one would expect of a good test. Hence, I think the questionnaire does a good job of separating out opinions. Where I think it falls down is the absolute placing of people. It would appear to me that the quiz is biased (in the statistical sense) towards the Left and Libertarianism. I say this for several reasons:

1) I know that I am not so far in to either the Left or into the Libertarian camp (Rand is one of my pet hate figures!) as I have come out.
2) I would have expected Die Hard to be partway into the positive-positive quadrant along with several others based on past posts.
3) Where are all the free marketeers? I can accept the lack of Authoritarianism in the current sample but with all the US posters here about one would expect at least one Reganite.

I suspect that if we all added about three or four to each of our scores it would be a truer reflection of reality. It has to be said though that a few of the questions are decidedly strange and for my money way off topic. Even so I don't think we can say for certain that the test is good or bad yet though, as not enough people with extreme (no offence intended here) views have had a go. I hope that Dakota North, ChelseaBell, crisw and IndyQueen for example can be encouraged to have a go as they may (or indeed may not) populate other parts of the graph. Presently nearly everyone lies close to a line from (-10,-10) to (+10,+10) with the majority being in the negative negative quadrant.

As I am such an anorak can tellywellies, bruyere and Coolupway please provide their actual scores for my graph? By PM even, if your embarrassed.

As I appear to be the only person who is any significant distance to the Left, I guess it falls to me to answer snm's question. Although I as I have indicated above do not feel myself to be anything close to the Far Left. No, the enemy of my enemy is not (by default) my friend. In turn would like to ask snm "why did you address this question to people on the Far Left alone?"

The question that tickled me pink was "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need is a fundamentally good idea?" Hands up any American who agreed even a little with this statement - the shade of J. Edgar will be on your trail! Some years ago now there was a survey of US High School kids, about a third of them thought this was a quote from the US Constitution, of the remainder a significant number thought it was from the Gettysburg address! I spent the whole day chucking about it.

Finally, Jax (who was Zebra) life is full of surprises and your score is certainly one for me!

Tielhard, first of all it appears you got the questions in a different order to me, the question I was referring to was a different one. Also, I wasn't really expecting an answer: it was a rhetorical question aimed specifically at Coolupway, which is why it appeared in brackets immediately following a statement I addressed to him (and he knows exactly what I was referring to).

"From each according to his ability, to each according to his need is a fundamentally good idea?"
I agree that this question perfectly demonstrates the problem with this test: it is based on ideology and ideas rather than on actual politics. For example, while I do think that this is a fundamentally good idea in theory, I think that in practice it is a very stupid idea. That explains my score to a certain extent: ideologically I'm pretty left wing, but in practice I'm not an ideologue, I'm a realist, and that pushes me a few more points towards the centre. Interestingly, I suspect that if my ideologies were right wing my realism would still push me towards the centre, rather than further right.

In addition, I agree that it does seem to map us out pretty accurately, as the one person I almost always agree with scored an almost identical second score to mine.

Welcome back T--

Comrade coolup is: Eco -2.38; auth -3.54.

N'doubt some may feel editors ought to shroud themselves in mystery. Well, I've just taken the test and my results are - wow - as follows:

Econ.: -2.63
Auth.: -5.59

Overall, I find the test rather naive, and would like to echo the view that the absence of a 'don't know' option was irritating in some of the questions. I also found some of the questions quite stupid. After all, surely the notion that 'children should be seen and not heard when their parents are entertaining' isn't going to get many people agreeing in 2003 ...