Professional Feedback on The Political Compass

My discovery of The Political Compass changed the way I think about politics and society. It gave my thinking about these topics structure and depth. It was such a revelation to me that I “tested” (almost) all my friends and family members . I plotted their results and tried to understand the psychological differences. Fascinating. Finally, The Political Compass became an inspiration for my young adult novel “Just City”. Thank you for your outstanding, highly significant work!

I am astonished about the clear and simple, but yet so profound and to my feeling accurate, graphical depiction of political positions, which the Political Compass achieves. The test or the analyses provided by the website offers great insight on the political landscape and ones relation to it. Even after years, I am still very fascinated.

One of the few intuitive measurement models on this topic. Planning on using it with my MBA students. Great work.

I am currently completing my Dissertation in MSc Applied Statistics at Oxford University. The subject of the Dissertation is using a combination of survey data and previous election results to better predict future UK elections. The Political Compass is an excellent tool, and I hugely admire the work you have done. It has inspired some of the themes in my research, and some key modelling choices.

I usually assign your website as a part of one of the courses I teach. I recognize your work on this project began as a labor of love and education, and certainly thank you for the service you provided over the years. Thank you for having contributed to the education of hundreds of my students. You have my gratitude.

Fascinating.

I am passing this on to many of my friends. What a wonderful platform for discussion.

Thank you for providing such an interesting and stimulating site. I regularly ask students in my ethics module to take a look, to help them contextualise their feelings and opinions at the start of the module. Whenever I do this, the feedback from the students is that it is a great tool and it really helps to generate enthusiasm and interest in the module.

I teach Sociology and have been using your site as an extra credit option, and am considering making it a requirement to complement some of the material in class. The exercise has been most interesting for my students. One continuing theme in their reactions is how they've never really thought about where they stand, they've just gone along with Mom or Dad. This exercise has resulted in my students thinking about politics and their place in it. Thank you so much for developing this site and for keeping it up and running - it's an invaluable tool for those of us in the social sciences.

Your test is just fascinating and very effective with high school students. I'm a teacher and I required my students to take the test last year. Then, I passed along the site to other teachers who did the same. It is truly wonderful to hear students, who at first come into the class with absolute conviction that they support the ideas of candidates only heard about at home, admit that they might have been narrow-minded and are now willing to research and discuss other political views ! The political compass works miracles for introducing a way to discover how an individual really feels about various propositions.

I was delighted to find out about The Political Compass and to introduce it to my law students. I have found it a very good tool for them to clarify their perspetives on ethical and policy matters. I commend you for creating such a useful website.

What a wonderful test and supporting materials ! Thank you.

In this year of divisive political campaigns, slogans and mudslinging, here is a little political test that is very enlightening. I found it very interesting and well worth the 30 minutes it takes to complete the test and read all of the material. Most important, it taught me some things about myself that I was not aware.

Thank you for a magnificent piece of work. I find it positively intriguing and inspirational. And a lot of fun as well as educational.

I teach social policy in a graduate program, and have my students each fall take the Political Compass test as a springboard for discussion of political ideology. Thanks for keeping the site up. It's a most useful learning tool.

Thank you for this wonderful tool for understanding. It does help getting "Beyond Tolerance."

Thanks very much for the web site! I teach Sociology at Oglala Lakota College on Pine Ridge Indian Reservation and hope that you do not mind if I use the compass in my soc intro classes to illustrate methodologies. I want to have the individual students take the survey and then we will use the results to develop a composite picture of the class (I think it will be interesting for the students and will hopefully get them excited about soc research)

I just wanted to thank you for your remarkable work and web site. Many of us here at the Graduate School of Education at Harvard University have taken the test and it has sparked many fascinating conversations .

Thank you again for your tremendous work. Hopefully, such analysis can lead to real understanding and political cooperation (I can dream can't I?)

Thank you for your valuable contribution to political analysis. I for one found it a freeing experience and believe that if it were more widely available, it could transform our political thinking and debate in this millennium. At a time when society seems increasingly disillusioned with their politicians and moral leaders a tool like this could assist in the engagement of those who for whatever reason feel themselves to be disenfranchised from the political process.

This site has enthralled so many of my formerly apolitical contemporaries in politics it seems to me it could serve not only as a truly remarkable tool for the study of political sciences but as a powerful weapon in the 'war' on political apathy in Western democracies.

Thank you so much for this website. I am a Grade 9 teacher and I have found it to be excellent for getting students to think about their values and the political ideologies that are formed on these values. The site is kept up to date and is extremely useful and interesting. Bravo.

Your work helps to infuse some grey into black & white politics, raise awareness of different views around the globe, increase self-awareness, stimulate interest in varying political views (while providing a means to learn more about them through the book lists), shake political myths, and provide an interesting take on the upcoming elections here in the states.

Thank you, thank you, thank you!!!

A wonderful instructional tool for all generations. I especially appreciated the Iconochasms . Clearly we shouldn't be blinkered by our enthusiasms.

I want to thank you for all your hard work. I can now show my Mom that politics and social awareness can be fun and doesn't have to upset you to talk about it. Even though it's much more fun if it does.

You are a pack of dummies …

Your site is a fine example of an online teaching aid. The site is truly interactive and provides a self-reflexive starting point for students to engage in, hence it is also a good example of learner-centered instruction. This is great stuff, thank you.

Completely fascinating and right on. Congratulations. The FAQs that came primarily from American respondents are an accurate reflection that Americans have no idea what they (we) are talking about regarding politics. Fallacies tend to drive public perceptions here. (The US is being strangled by neo-conservatism, and it tends to drag those with low IQs with it)

I teach American Government at my university and feel The Political Compass would be a useful teaching tool and at a minimum provoke interesting discussions.

This is an excellent revision of the Political Spectrum. As a retired Political Science Professor I used a similar scale to compare political systems.

Thanks

I've found your test to be one of the most informative and well-written political spectrums on the Internet. Keep up the good work.

While searching for information on the US primaries I came across your test and have just completed it. I find it intelligent and unique in giving a new and better conception of political positioning.I shall be introducing my 10th grade politics class to your Compass tomorrow! Keep up your good work.

Fascinating!

I started out my professional career as a minister of the Gospel, working with transient men and women in a rescue mission setting and later as a pastoral counselor. My right wing, conservative political and economic stance began to shift over time as I continually dealt with folks who were down and out and struggling to survive.

I went back to school in a secular university, adding social science to my theology training. My authoritarian stance softened as I learned even more about the varied human condition and the vast diversity of cultures worldwide. What a revelation it was to plot myself on your two axes and to realize in this graphic illustration, just what these changes have done to me ! I have been thinking that I was confused, but now I have a way to understand the shift, as well as a historic and cultural context. I am standing with one foot in each of two different ideological worlds. It is then no surprise to find myself almost exactlly midpoint left/right and close to neutral on authoritarian/libertarian.

You have done your homework. My experience validates your instrument.

I find the test very accurate for measuring personal political orientation &hellp; it will be very instructive for my students &hellp; congratulations for your great site.

Bravo! Brilliant synthesis, applied with intelligence and wit. Carry on the excellent work.

As a teacher I would like to thank you for taking the time to put together such a solid website that serves as the basis for our class discussions (and arguments) about politics and society. It is invaluable for students to understand their own beliefs in relation to the various influences around them [parents, peers, media] and then to hopefully start thinking critically about what shapes their beliefs.

… used your brilliant site on the Security and Defense Course for journalists, of which I am the Director. The reception was enthusiastic. Bravo and Bis.

I've been using The Political Compass as a tool to teach my Media Studies students where their own politics lay in comparison to that of the media they consume. And a brilliant little tool it is too.

I found your compass very interesting — but there is a third dimension that you have not included: Finance. There is a tendency for richer individuals to vote for the authoritarian right because they tend to lower taxes, relative to the left. A further set of questions looking at whether one's heart rule one's head / whether walletry factors might change the way you vote would make the site even more interesting!

Excellent website, good questionnaire.

One comment. Arthur Scargill and Stalin are outliers (and only then if you assume that Stalin believed in left-wing causes, a big assumption when his political philosophy was, in his own words 'people fear death'), apart from that, you appear to have a very good correlation running from ++ to --.

Well thought out, and very, very well presented. Hell, even I understood it!

The web needs sites like this to contextualise discussions about left and right, so well done to all concerned.

Very informative little test. Provoked a lot of discussion at work. Thanks.

Just taken the political compass questionnaire and have found the results quite illuminating as have the 20 or so other members of staff in our Student Union. I am a trainer within student unions and the National Union of Students and would like to use the questionnaire as a method of facilitiating learning about the richness of diversity within societies and how that difference is to be desired. This could go on further to look at equal opps training as well.

The Political Compass is a great idea. I totally agree with communism being an economic term, and fascism being social/political. It's about time someone questioned the old 'straight line' system. A job well done. Keep up the good work.

Congratulations on your site, it's fantastic.

I really enjoyed your site. You've succeeded in creating a meaningful correlation between the question and its effect on the compass - not an easy task. I'm sure you have better things to do, but I propose a further challenge/refinement. It seems the one limitation of your matrix is the lack of influence of one axis on the other; that is, you can conceivably plot a person in one of the four corners.

Thanks for producing this web site -- informative, entertaining, and thought provoking. One suggestion I had was that you include some discussion of the underlying scoring methodology used in the test.

A thrilling 'roller-coaster' of political, economic and social deliberation. I certainly enjoyed myself on political compass - even your granny would love it !

In 1963 I published the results of two research studies which directly confirm your hypotheses. The citation is Authoritarianism of the Political Right, Center, and Left. The Journal of Social Issues, Volume XIX, No. 2, pp.63-74. Interesting stuff you're doing.

I would like to have my 400 students do the test. Most of them hope to have careers in the various branches of the law enforcement professions. I think they should have some sense of where their values and beliefs locate them on the political spectrum

I like your Political Compass and test very much.

Thanks. This is a wonderful test that I will start using in my political sociology class.

I'm a graduate of social and political sciences from Cambridge. I enjoyed your site very much.

Your excellent Political Compass website … acts as both an amusing and instructive introduction to politics and political ideas.

I much enjoyed your entertaining and instructive website.

I have found your Political Compass the most engaging and stimulating site on the web to help people think about their political views.

This is a very good site, and my own results seemed accurate.

I was interested that all of the politicians in the UK are essentially in a line from the top right to bottom left - in that sense British politics remains dismally unidimensional.

Great website

Thanks for devising The Political Compass. My students really enjoyed the process. I want to try it again, near the end of the school year, to see if their views have changed after a year of study of various political/social/economic issues.

Brilliant!

I enjoyed your test very much.

The test appears to have worked reasonably well for me. Perhaps you could amuse yourselves by constructing a cube out of a sample of your responses.

Very interesting test. The results surprised me a little, but upon reviewing them in closer detail and thinking about the analysis, it was bang on.

Absolutely brilliant website.

It's a great test and can serve as a point of departure for many interesting dialogues.

Good to see something like this, especially referring to Reich and Adorno for inspiration.

A fascinating site

I'm strongly recommending this website. It's brilliant !

What I love most about The Political Compass is that it reclaims the term 'libertarian', which has been so abused and misrepresented here in America.

What a pleasure to find a website that offers an intelligent analysis of political/social/economic thought.

Great work on the Political Compass. Very helpful outline of strands of political thought, and a good de-bunker of some common misunderstandings and myths.

Well thought through. It was great to witness such a volume of people who were truly fascinated by the test and outcome.