Introduction
Another one of my little experiments for you to enjoy or laugh at the shortcomings of. I quite like the 2D political compass, and I thought it would be interesting to see where all the parties lie. Essentially instead of a one dimensional left/right wing we can use two vectors instead to better describe a political view. In particular an idea popularised by Nolan uses economic liberty on one axis with high levels of freedom (neo-liberalism) described as 'right' wing and low levels of freedom (socialism) described as 'left' wing. However one can also plot personal levels of freedom separately. Weirdly, the 'left' wing here usually corresponds to greater levels of personal freedom however it is less confusing to use a vertical axis with libertarianism on the bottom and authoritarianism on the top.
To see more detail about this set-up I suggest looking at
The original political compass quiz does give positions however, I wanted to do an up to date version based on the manifestos.
I used this quiz instead though, because it gives the option of neutral and seems less overtly 'Americanized' than the original one:
The results are still plotted on the crowd chart.
Economic/Social politics
In order to answer the questions I read through the relevant bits of the manifesto and answered the questions as best as I could. Vague affirmative or negative answers were scored agree/disagree, obvious specific points were scored strongly agree/strongly disagree. The positions were weighted according to how often they appeared in the manifesto. If it was a couple of words then it was 'not important', whereas an entire chapter was rated as 'very important'. In the case where the issue was not addressed at all the answer was answered 'neutral' and declared completely unimportant. The somewhat surprising results are given:
Note I multiplied each coordinate by two for ease of viewing, in reality the parties are actually not that far away from each other and the manifestos had a surprising amount of common ground.
Keep in mind this result is only based on the manifestos, but it might interest people that the position in 2D space was just as much determined about what was not mentioned in the manifesto (and therefore relegated to the default low priority 'neutral' answer) as what was mentioned. Please also note, that this quiz despite being far more UK appropriate was designed for America, this is why all the parties are left wing (at least that's my hypothesis), the relative positions are more important than the absolute ones.
Firstly it should not surprise anyone that the Tories are more right wing than the Labour party, however what struck me is that there really were relatively few policy differences with regard to the economy, just that Labour seemed to lack any enthusiasm in this area, much less of the manifesto was devoted to the economy and when answers were given they were far more vague. However both the Tories and Labour agreed that we need a strong economy. There was an area which Labour was actually the most right wing party and that was on pensions. Interestingly the Labour party seemed to be more willing to allow pensions to fluctuate with the market, however this may simply represent the economical lack of interest which seemed to be a recurring theme, rather than Labour actually being right wing on this issue.
The fact that the liberal democrats come out as right of the Tories in their manifesto should be deeply worrying for them, and really pushes the point home how much damage the coalition seemed to do. Nevertheless it is really surprising to me that this is the case, I suspect this may partly be explained by the contrasting views on Europe. The Tories are Euroskeptics, unlike the lib dems, so they devoted more of their manifesto to the issue of a reform in Europe. Therefore the lib dem emphasis on EU free trade agreements may give the (false?) impression the liberal democrats are more right wing than they actually are. Still, it is very unhealthy for the party.
All the parties come across as being rather authoritarian, with the exception of UKIP. In Labour and the conservatives this is indicated by a want for more aggressive laws against extremism, something that the Liberal democrats described as potentially 'chilling' to free speech. The Tory idea we have heard recently 'we shouldn't just let people live their lives even if they are not doing anything criminal' comes across somewhat in their manifesto, this together with a higher tolerance to moral conservatism is probably why the Tory party is more authoritarian than labour (albeit slightly).
The lib dems in this regard are actually a bit of a paradox, they seem to struggle to juggle the aggressive 'labour' need for enforcing equality of outcome, with the 'liberal' need to live and let live. The lib dem manifesto could have a great argument with itself! On the one hand introducing new laws to guarantee free speech while at the same time wanting to to criminalise homophobic language! It is this internal battle between progressivism and libertarianism which I think prevents the lib dems from being the most libertarian party. On the other hand the elements of moral conservatism in UKIP that would clearly retard its efforts to be seen as a libertarian party are absent in the manifesto, there is, for example, no reference to the death penalty or gay marriage which would presumably have pushed UKIP to the north.
Hope you all found this interesting, I wanted to do something like this before GE but I honestly didn't have time with exams. I do it now, just because its interesting to me. Any criticism and comments welcome.
Millitary/culture politics.
The test also allows you to plot two additional indices. One measuring interventionism and the other described as 'cultural liberalism'. I think in a UK context that would be more appropriately described as progressivism and whatever the opposite of that is (I'm guessing meritism). Progressives would generally be in favour of affirmative action, tougher discrimination laws and quotas whereas a meritist would be more apathetic.
I won't comment for too much on this one. Liberal democrat being pacifist compared to Labour and conservative is unsurprising, the progressive politics of LibLab compared to Conkip is also to be expected. The one odd thing is that UKIP is listed as interventionist, when by all accounts it is pacifist. I think this is a flaw in the quiz, parties in favour of military expansion is used as a proxy for interventionism (which is reasonable in general), however UKIP is odd in that it wants increased military spending, yet reduced foreign intervention; a concept that highlights the simplicity of this quiz unfortunately.
References:
The original quiz. Also used to plot the results more clearly:
The quiz used in these results:
Labour manifesto: www.labour.org.uk/manifesto2015
Tory manifesto: https://www.conservatives.com/Manifesto
Lib dem manifesto: http://www.libdems.org.uk/manifesto
UKIP manifesto: http://www.ukip.org/manifesto2015
