You have the “1D” political compass of left vs right, but those terms are so broad they can describe completely opposite viewpoints. Then there’s the “2D” political compass with authoritarian/libertarian and the classic left/right, but that is still quite broad and doesn’t fit every ideology and belief well. If someone were to create a fully fleshed out N-dimensional political compass that could accurately summarise generalise to a reasonable degree of accuracy* a person’s political perspective, how many axes are needed, and what would they be?

Of the top of my head, I can think of a few:

  • authoritarian vs anti-authoritarian (on the extremes, you would have dictator bootlickers who support a one-rules-all style system and anarchists advocating for no authority at all)
  • internationalism vs nationalism
  • egalitarianism vs traditionalism (social equality vs hierarchal society)
  • environmentalist vs anti-environmentalist (every policy must consider environmental impacts vs cLiMaTe ChAnGe Is A hOaX)
  • progressive vs conservative (or pro-change vs anti-change)
  • intellectualism vs anti-intellectualism (pro-science vs anti-science)
  • free vs regulated economy (on the extremes, no government influence of the economy at all and a state-run economy)

Please don’t treat this as an argument over why your politics are better! Debating politics is the worst kind of internet argument one can consume themselves into…

Also, please note that this post is not intended to attack anyone with the above viewpoints. Just want to make that clear.

  • chaosCruiser@futurology.todayEnglish
    2·
    1 day ago

    Oh, that’s a very cool study. However, here’s an important bit that should help with interpreting it.

    Our goal is not to provide a comprehensive account of ideology in the U.S. public, but rather it is to make a convincing case that unidimensional treatments of ideology obscure important (and interesting) complexities in the antecedents of political orientations. We believe this goal to be best served by keeping the analyses tractable. We thus exclude a number of issues from consideration, focusing on the two core domains of social and economic conservatism. In particular, we do not address issues associated with race, immigration, or foreign policy. These are obviously core issues in American politics, and future work needs to expand on the present article to explore additional complexities arising from these issues.

    I really hope someone has dumped a gazillion questions into a similar process. Would be really curious to find out how many dimensions you would really need to explain the data.

    Anyway, the economic and social dimensions definitely are needed as a foundation of any political model. If you did a more comprehensive study, you would obviously add some more dimensions on this foundation.