1 left/right +0.4110 (+0.0247)
2 pragmatism +4.0317 (+0.2427)
Scatter plot
This diagram shows your position on the two axes in graphical form. The axes
are labelled as described above. The plot has been compressed to show the
relative importance of the two axes. Your position is shown as a red cross.
For guidance, the names and small grey crosses on the scatter plot show
roughly where we think the named political personalities would score on this
test, for comparison. This is computed by guessing what answers these people
would give. You can look at how we've assumed these people would answer the
survey. Note that these people have not actually answered the survey; their
positions are based on what they are reported to have said on various issues.
You should review the assumed answers for these personalities, and contact us
if you think we've assigned an incorrect view to anyone.
-----Original Message-----
From: Larry C. Lyons [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Friday, November 28, 2003 11:15 AM
To: CF-Community
Subject: Interesting Political Opinions Survey
I think that this survey is much more valid than the other ones we've tried.
http://politics.beasts.org/
FWIW, here are my scores:
http://politics.beasts.org/scripts/results?surveyid=838428544
Axis Position
1 left/right -7.2199 (-0.4346)
2 pragmatism +2.2182 (+0.1335)
Anyhow the following is part of the rationale of the survey given by
its authors.
--
politicalcompass.org is a web site which asks a number of opinion
questions of its visitors, and then places them in a two-dimensional
space which is supposed to characterize their political views.
Unfortunately, politicalcompass.org has a poor reputation; in
particular, there is a suspicion that its questions are designed to
make respondents lean towards an economically right-wing, socially
liberal ("right libertarian") position, and the two axes of variation
on which results are plotted are opaque in their derivation and may
not be tremendously relevant.
These suspicions are compounded by the problem that
politicalcompass.org's methods are not open and, therefore, it is not
possible to determine whether their selection of questions carries a
bias which its operators are using to further their own ends.
The purpose of this site is to do a survey of this type properly and
openly, so that the methods and data in use are open to inspection.
More detail
The proper way to do this is to collect a bunch of questions and a
bunch of answers to them, then take the space defined by all the
answers to the questions, and construct a spanning basis for it. The
natural way to do this is with principal components analysis, though
as a non-statistician I can't comment on whether this is actually the
best approach. We should then be able to discover -- in terms defined
by the answers to the questions set -- the significant axes of
variation in the data.
This means that all the results we get are defined by the data: we do
not measure anyone's views according to criteria we set out, but
according to endogenous criteria. The only points at which our
judgment enters the method are
* when choosing questions (or, rather propositions); and
* when we give context to the results.
The first of those shouldn't matter, if the questions are reasonably
unbiased and cover a wide enough range of subject materials. The
second doesn't matter, since it's just a presentational issue.
--
So far I'm going over their analysis, and looking at how they did the
factor analysis, it looks pretty good so far. I'm going download
their data over the weekend and run it through a few of my stats
programs (SPSS for the factor analysis and AMOS for the causal
modelling/path analysis) and see if it holds. but my first impression
by looking at their published eigenvectors, is that it looks legit.
larry
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