I have perceived that shift and would put it down to exposure to John Howard over a long period of time and to Mark Bahnisch over a shorter period of time when you gave him keys to the blog. Though having said that, it hasn’t worked on me.

-2 and more on each axis isn’t very centrist, really. I think you need to work on reducing that figure to around -1.5

Sorry, Ken!

Perhaps someone with better tech skills than I could create an automated system. (Tim Lambert, perhaps?)

There is no left and right just positions you agree/disagree with. And if we’re all sensible and not ideological we’re flexible.

On PC I’m barely authoritarian or barely not authoritarian depending on my mood at the time and a moderate left economically.

I find the Party specific tests more applicable there is one at ozpolitics and one at selectsmart.com which has heaps of internet quizzes. I believe yobbo has one too. They’re all the ones I know offhand.

I haven’t worked out what that means yet as I have to go to work.

I’m aware of most of the other political quizzes you mention. Political Compass is IMO by far the best of them. Robert Corr linked to another one in the last couple of days (see http://www.politicalsurvey2005.com/). However, it’s very UK-oriented and quite poorly thought out. With due respect to Yobbo’s effort (jointly with John Humphreys from Aust Libertarians blog, if I remember rightly), it was very half-baked indeed and not worthy of serious consideration. By comparison, the Political Compass test is a prety serious and scholarly attempt at creating something that yields meaningful results. Have a go at it and see how you do.

I agree that a straight left-right labelling exercise is invariably worthless and merely pejorative. But combining it with an analysis of social orientation, and approaching the compilation and analysis of questions in a scientific way turns the exercise into something much more substantial. Labelling someone as a slightly left-leaning social libertarian doesn’t have anywhere near the same pejorative impact as calling them a “leftie lunatic” or similar, and conveys useful information about political orientation.

Here’s what the Political Compass people have to say about one of your usual arguments about faux-centrism, namely that the mid-point is variable over time and between societies, because of changing political fashions (and that a label like “centrist” is essentially almost meaningless:

“Some critics have argued that, because the universal political centre has moved to the right, our axes should correspondingly move to the right. This, however, would not indicate how far one way or the other society has shifted. It could not convey paradoxes such as the fact that, in the UK, New Labour occupies an economic position to the right of pre-Thatcher Conservatives. Where was the centre, for example, in Apartheid South Africa ? In Third Reich society, such a skewed analysis might show a Nazi opposed to the death chambers as representing liberal opinion.

Narrowing the standard political goalposts to accommodate merely the range of mainstream opinion within any given society at a given time is not only historically uninstructive; it is unscientific.”

In other words, they claim to measure political orientation by reference to quasi-objective substantive attitudes to specific issues and propositions, rather than by reference to an inherently relativistic mid-point at a given point in time in a given society.

Whether they actually succeed in that aim is another question. One would suspect that there are some unavoidable subjective biases i.e. that they are making assumptions about the ideological significance of particular answers, where the resulting assumptions from exactly the same answers would have been different 15 or 50 years ago.

But the fact that it is impossible to achieve perfect objectivity in measuring something as inherently problematic as political orientation, doesn’t mean that the attempt is worthless or that it can’t yield useful information.

In any event, I have no doubt that all of us, even you, make mental evaluations about the ideological standpoints of people with whom we deal on political matters. IMO the most satisfactory way of doing so is to be open and transparent about the classificatory process every human being necessarily performs in order to make sense of the world from previous experience, and by so doing continually remind ourselves that, even though any person’s opinion on a given issue will certainly be coloured/influenced by their upbringing and the basic values and assumptions they bring to the question, that should never prevent us from examining their specific arguments strictly on their merits (to the extent that is possible given our own subjective biases and assumptions).

Anyway, so much for argument 54.

Me, the Dalai Lama, Nelson Madela and Ghandi lining up for the libertarian left.

Or whether it is a more philosophically driven idea, based on pragmatism. There is no such thing as a Platonic perfectible universe, so ideal solution towards which we are struggling.

If the latter, then the centre is actually a fixed philosophical point which reaches out to achieve the possible. Hence a coherent body of belief, with varying policies.

In the first sense, I identify with the social democratic left. In the second, I am a centrist. And I think that’s ultimately Ken’s definition as well.

Will get back to you in the fullness Ken. I’m rather fond of argument 54.

I know that I’m supposed to make allowances for the fact that its just a quiz, but I can’t manage the questions.

For instance “I’d always support my country, whether it was right or wrong” is not such a bad question I suppose. I think I know what they’re getting at.

But another question is “Controlling inflation is more important than controlling unemployment”. Well who wouldn’t want to control the latter if one had the choice between it and the former. The only reason you’d argue against the proposition is that there isn’t a real tradeoff. So how to answer the question?

Likewise the question about whether globalisation is for the people or the corporations.

Some questions are so BALD. “What’s good for the most successful corporations is always, ultimately, good for all of us.” Well I kind of agree with a much milder version of this. What’s good for corporations is often good for all of us (well many of us actually). Do I mildly agree, or strongly disagree (on the grounds that the question has been put in such a simplistic way that the statement as it stands is ridiculous.)

Anyway, I really hate these kinds of questionaires, and I expected to find it a lot worse than it was :). Quite a few of the questions were fairly straightforward and meaningful. So I can’t complain.

In case anyone’s interested, I ‘strongly agreed’ with everything in the test so I could scan the pages. I was split down the middle left right and 1/3 above neutral towards authoritarianism.

Perhaps OT but not quite. These quizzes always like to identify the sainted Gandhi and Dalai Lama as ‘the libertarian left’. I wish they’d choose better models.

Gandhi today would be called an ant-black racist
http://foreigndispatches.typepad.com/dispatches/2004/09/ghandi_in_south.html
His views on other matters were also rather medieval. I’m not sure how much he would have approved of gay rights. The Dalai Lama? Doesn’t like gays or abortion either
http://jeetfiskdo.blogspot.com/2004/04/middle-way.html

These 2 figures are every much as medievalistic as Ratzinger and don’t deserve the reputations they have among the Left.

the compass poll annoyed me, the question were wrong, and i had no way to enter “this question is badly written”

i’ve entered the compass score though at tim’s

Ozpolitics and Yobbo’s often yield the same results for me.

I don’t know how true it is but I’ve come to the conclusion its impossible to be on the economic right and be and anarchist libertarian part of the PC quiz.

ie the bottom right quadrant.

I’ve avoided the UK survey as I do not know where their parties stand in correspondence to the US and Aus equivalents.

Where as for eg. I know or rather infer that the US republicans are a more extreme form of the Liberal Party of Australia.

I wonder if we’ll ever get a test that says “deakinite liberal” or “howardian centralist”, etc? I doubt it

The concept of a ‘centre’ is owed to the French revolution, afterwhich the assembly broke into left and right sides of the speaker, and the short-hand terms were adopted, as if to imagine that political ideology could be conceived as a continuous spectrum. The ideological composition and balance of the assembly would determine where the centre fell, and hence it was purely relative.

The quiz appears to have recreated the idea of the ‘centre’ by imagining two separate ideological spectrums, and then representing them as if they somehow intersect at the ‘centre’. The very act of simplistically bifurcating the already simplifying spectrum metaphor is highly ideological, promoting abstract divisions between the social and economic orders on faux-scientific grounds – immediately burying one of the most crucial questions of current political debate: why large numbers of people today, on either sides of politics, vote against their ostensible economic interests on social grounds. In the world of your quizz, this paradox is implicitly normalised, and taken off the table. Whatever, the real world continues to turn.

Getting back to Argument 54. The historical connotations attached to centrism remain, as points of objection to the self-proclaimed varity, even if the attachment to the idea of ‘centrism’ is sincerely held.

First, laying claim to the centre carries debating advantages, implying someone who can see all sides, who is fair and neutral, who is not constrained by hidebound ideology, the last reasonable white man. Those denied this debating advantage will resent those who claim it for themselves, and will feel like taking the piss, to deny said advantage.

Second, the short-hand terms as applied to real politics, and to the sphere, are arguably more misleading than revealing. The world has changed a good deal since 1789. There is a strongly organised and well defined political right in Australia and the world today, and this is not the movement for stability and order that originally owned the right-wing label. Indeed, adherents to the original idea of conservativeness are as likely to be found in opposition to the present order, along with the rest of the ill-defined and disorganised residual, where things are more complex, and the left has been largely disabled over the revolutionary tradition and the idea of progress.

To insist on a ‘centre’ in these de-centred conditions is thus to constantly breathe life into a metaphor that is fundamentaly distorting, conjuring up political battalions that do not exist. There is only one big battalion on the field, and the heterogeneous rest of us. I suspect it will only be when the current direction exhausts itself that we will be able to really get some definition on the future ‘left’, to find out who we have been keeping company with as we contest the Big Right Turn.

And I don’t think 32 stands up logically if that how yer thinking of responding.

Reminds me of the old joke about the prisoners, all lifers, who became so familiar with their vast reservoir of jokes they only had to yell the number. “No 10″, one would say, and everyone would break-up. “No 38″, another would crack, reducing everyone to tears. Then, from over in the corner, “No 22″ ventures a third, and there’s deathly silence. “Some blokes,” observes a senior lifer, “just can’t tell a joke.”