Nolan Chart exhibits staying power
The folks at "OkCupid!" bring us a fun variant on the not-very-fun "World's Smallest Political Quiz" that Libertarian Party activists have pushed on unsuspecting fairgoers ever since party founder David Nolan came up with the original 2-D chart. I will happily admit that in the true political N-space, N approaches infinity (or is it "K", Michael?), so any such chart is a simplification and quite possibly a dangerous one. But I think the two-dimensional way of thinking about political issues at least has merit relative to the one-dimensional left-right spectrum.
For example, there is little doubt where libertarians belong on the Nolan Chart, but it's hard to place them on the left-right axis. (For a while I've half-jokingly claimed to be a centrist on that axis -- but as shown below, I may not be wrong.) If there were only a few libertarians (or authoritarians!) in America, either approach would work well for political map-users. But while the number of ideological libertarians isn't overwhelming -- certainly not as high as those located clearly on the left or right -- survey research data suggests it is much higher than Libertarian Party vote totals would suggest.
When that party commissioned Rasmussen Research to administer the World's Smallest Political Quiz as part of a scientific poll back in 2000, Rasmussen reported that 16% of Americans fell in the libertarian sector. OkCupid! is plotting all test takers on a 2-D chart (below) using blue pixels for Kerry voters in 2004 and red for Bush voters (note that 2/3 of those who have taken OkCupid!'s test voted for Kerry), and there are a good number of people in a reasonable radius from yours truly, though probably not quite 16%. Perhaps more interesting is the decidedly purple color of that libertarian vicinity -- and the predominance of red in the mercifully less-populated authoritarian zone.
we have the same % score, did you copy me, or is the test a little more
discrete than I understood it to be?
Hippies! 81 social, 85 economic.
That's interesting because I was a "socialist" and got the same comment:
"You exhibit a very well sense of right and wrong and believe in economic
fairness" ...
I got "Socialist" too... I liked the "famous people" graph. I was just to
the right of Gorbachev for some reason... I wanted to be closer to Ghandi.
I guess I'll have to redo the test and be more of a wimp.
Lol it's gone again.
You must not like Karate I presume ?
Yeah, speaking of Gandhi and Hillary, I love how three of the four corners
are occupied by despicable people, with the fourth corner -- the Democrat
corner -- occupied by Gandhi. Gee, I wonder what the sympathies of the
designer are...