David Emanuel Andersson

The Best Ideological Quiz? February 27, 2009

I really enjoy answering political and ideological quizzes. I have even used the quizzes of various newspapers to determine (yes, determine, not just influence) my personal choices in local and national elections. But a problem with most quizzes tends to be that they are influenced either by current political controversies in specific nations – such as abortion in America - or the ideological preferences of the designer.  I think I have found a test that avoids those pitfalls at  http://www.okcupid.com/tests/take?testid=16378307404171364367.

The test is described as follows:

“Most politics tests assess your opinions on a collection of controversial issues and then allocate a political label to you that best corresponds to that set of opinions. But you may have arrived at that particular set  of opinions by happenstance rather than as the result of applying a particular political philosophy. This test allocates labels to you on the basis of your response to particular philosophical statements. The assumption behind this test is that the three most important objectives of all-issues political movements in the modern era have been Equality and Liberty and Stability. Your varying levels of commitment to these will determine your philosophical category (what you do in practice may be different). As much as is practical this test uses the universal definitions of political terms rather than any nation-specific usage.”

The test only consists of ten questions, but the characterization of my personal political ideology is surprisingly accurate:

“You think liberty is important both for yourself and for all of humanity. You respect others and think it is important that everyone be given the opportunity to make decisions for themselves rather than have authority figures tell them what is best. The autonomy of every person is important to you but you think there are times in which personal action needs to be limited. As such you recognize that there is a role for government as long as it depends on the consent of the governed – this makes parliamentary democracy important to you. You prefer the role of government in economics and society to be small. In practice you will tolerate public sector activity as long as it is efficient and allows you to get on with your life. You are likely to advocate both a predominantly free-market economy and a cosmopolitan and permissive culture.”

The label given to this position is liberal, which is distinct both from (minarchist) “libertarian” and “progressive” (which corresponds to ”liberal” in its modern American sense), and seems to correspond to a unique set of answers to the ten questions. The author of the test (former Australian Democrat parliamentary candidate and “progressive” Daniel Berk) sees liberalism – in the tradition of Adam Smith and the Scottish enlightenment -as distinct from and slightly more supportive of government initiatives than modern libertarianism. I couldn’t agree more.