How PolitiCompass Works

PolitiCompass maps your political position on two independent axes rather than on a single left-right line. The reason is straightforward: a one-dimensional scale cannot distinguish between arrangements that people living under them could tell apart immediately. On a single line, a Nordic social democracy and a one-party state both register as "left", and a classical liberal who favours free markets while opposing state censorship registers as left and right at the same time.

The test consists of fifteen statements. For each one you indicate how strongly you agree or disagree on a five-point scale. There are no trick questions and no right answers. Each statement was chosen because responses to it discriminate between recognisable political positions rather than because it is controversial.

The horizontal axis measures economic organisation. Positions to the left favour collective provision, redistribution and public ownership as means of securing equity and welfare. Positions to the right favour market allocation, private property and individual initiative as the primary drivers of prosperity. The axis runs from -10 to +10, with 0 representing a position that is genuinely balanced between the two rather than merely undecided.

The vertical axis measures attitudes to authority. Positions toward the authoritarian end favour strong central power to maintain social order, national cohesion and shared values, and accept greater constraints on individual conduct to achieve them. Positions toward the libertarian end prioritise personal autonomy, freedom of expression and association, and strict limits on what the state may compel or prohibit.

Combining the two produces four quadrants: authoritarian left, authoritarian right, libertarian left and libertarian right. Your result places you within one of them, together with the ideologies whose approximate coordinates sit nearest to yours. Those neighbouring ideologies are a starting point for reading, not a label: proximity on two axes does not mean you share a tradition's reasoning or endorse its history.

Two limitations are worth stating plainly. First, fifteen questions place you in a quadrant with reasonable confidence but cannot resolve fine gradations within one, so treat your coordinates as approximate. Second, the model measures positions and not the reasoning behind them, so two people can reach identical coordinates from incompatible premises. If your result surprises you, the useful exercise is to identify which specific answer produced it.