The Development of an Accurate Political Compass Test

Take the test here (85 questions). The article below is a description of its creation.

Many are probably familiar with the concept of the political compass. It divides political opinion into two main axes: a social scale that ranges from authoritarian to libertarian, and an economic scale that ranges from left to right (creating four quadrants).

There’s a flaw with how the original test was designed though. Democrats in the United States usually get libertarian-left on the test, when they properly belong in the authoritarian-right quadrant. Existing tests like this are fundamentally biased.

Thankfully, there’s a way to correct this. A very similar test to the original political compass is called DozenValues. Here is what a sample of 25 Democrats looks like on that DozenValues test. You can see that they fall mainly in the libertarian-left quadrant, edging towards the center:

However, with weighting the questions differently, and adding some new ones, we get results that look more like they should:

Here is the average of results for samples of Democrats (blue) and Republicans (red). You can see that the Democrats are on average more authoritarian and also slightly to the left of Republicans.

Here is another link to the test if you would like to see where you score. Category descriptions can be found on DozenValues.