How many surveys can one man produce? “Yet another Chris Lightfoot effort”:http://www.politicalsurvey2005.com/ , which places you on two axes: “crime and punishment, internationalism” (where I’m apparently “very left-wing”) and “economics, etc.” where I turn out to be a “centrist”. Again, rather Britocentric I’m afraid. (You can see my position “here”:http://www.politicalsurvey2005.com/scripts/quiz?s=AAGBHBEFDBAEABEEEDAABCCBDDBBDDBDBCBEBBBDDA . ) (Hat tip: Robin Grant – who is collecting results over at “perfect.co.uk”:http://www.perfect.co.uk/2005/04/political-survey-2005 )
{ 26 comments }
abb1 04.15.05 at 1:04 pm
Who believe in just ‘free markets’? Neoliberalism is probably a better word.
junius ponds 04.15.05 at 2:32 pm
Despite being in favor of rail renationalization, increasing taxes on the rich, etc., somehow I’m economically centrist. Perhaps this is because I answered in favor of immigrant workers and against tariffs? Perhaps my agreement wasn’t sufficiently strong?
Crime and punishment, internationalism
Your position on this axis is -4.3
You are likely to be fairly internationalist and rehabilitationist.
Economics, etc
Your position on this axis is 0.2
You are likely to be centrist.
bi 04.15.05 at 3:29 pm
(abb1 replaces a meaningless term with an even more meaningless term.)
abb1 04.15.05 at 4:27 pm
Why, neither one is a meaningless term. Just type ‘neoliberalism’ in google and you’ll see.
As far as the ‘free markets’, it’s not a meaningless term, but I just don’t see how believing in free markets would make one prefer American model of government or support the war in Iraq.
John Quiggin 04.15.05 at 9:22 pm
I got much the same as Junius and Chris (-4.9, -0.3) and for much the same reasons as Junius [and, I assume, Chris as well]
Still, even if you assume that some of the economic leftism is protectionism, the implied position of the British public is obviously miles to the left of Blair and Brown.
bi 04.16.05 at 12:06 am
abb1: well, George Lakoff already addressed the term “free market”. And “neo-liberalism” (what has it got to do with liberalism anyway?) is confused often enough with “libertarianism” that I think it’s correct to say that it too has become meaningless.
(If Wikipedia is any guide, that is: “Neoliberals believe that greater economic and political interdependence will lead to progress and a reduction of international tensions or at least divert states from utilizing military means to resolve conflict. Libertarians reject the neoliberal belief that global governance bodies or state negotiated treaty regimes that bind the individual are desirable.”)
Matt McGrattan 04.16.05 at 2:36 am
I come out fairly far to the left on this scheme:
I don’t actually think of myself as being particularly left wing. Like Junius I’m generally against tariffs, for example, and for more freedom for immigration.
The problem with these questions is that they can never really be fine grained enough on a lot of issues. I come out as strongly “rehabilitationist” on law and order, for example, but actually have fairly strong views about personal responsibility in a whole range of cases. It doesn’t distinguish between, for example, what we might call ‘pragmatic rehabilitationism’ — draconian punishment simply doesn’t work if our goal is to reduce offending — and ‘ideological rehabilitationism’ — it’s not really many criminals’ faults and we ought to recognize them as victims of circumstances beyond their control.
Both positions would lead to roughly the same answers on the survey but one would be more stereotypically ‘left’ than the other.
Similarly with say, EU membership. One can believe that EU membership and being part of a wider international consensus are good things while being pretty profoundly sceptical of some of the institutions and parts of the legislative framework that make up the EU. The survey only distinguishes broadly ‘pro’ and ‘anti’ viewpoints on these issues.
It’s still a pretty interesting survey though…
abb1 04.16.05 at 5:59 am
Bi, your link is right that ‘free markets’ don’t exist in the real-life economics, but as something to ‘believe in’, as an ideal – why not?
If neoliberalism is confused with something else – does it make it meaningless?
Name a socio-economic concept that is not meaningless – Socialism? Fascism? Feudalism?
Is everything meaningless? Well, it’s certainly a valid angle, and I can relate to that; but unfortunately it leaves nothing to talk about.
Cheers.
abb1 04.16.05 at 9:06 am
Which word in my previous comment (#7) triggered ‘Your comment is awaiting moderation‘?
Peter 04.16.05 at 1:21 pm
Was the survey designed deliberately to produce roughly equal numbers in all four corners of the graph, rather than test various viewpoints and see where people appear to lie, whatever the pattern formed? I can’t help but wonder, given one would naturally expect that (a few web libertarians aside) the correlation between left/right-wing economic policies and left/right-wing attitudes to crime, foreign policy would be quite strong.
In particular, the choice to put the war with Iraq on the economic side because support for it so often goes hand in hand with support for the free market, makes clear that if Iraq had been put on the horizontal axis alongside other cultural and international issues, there would have been a positive correlation. Is that why it was put on the economic axis?
Chris Lightfoot 04.16.05 at 2:51 pm
“In particular, the choice to put the war with Iraq on the economic side” — there’s no choice involved, in fact — the extraction of the axes is completely mechanical. The method identifies the axes which maximise the variance of the respondents’ answers along those axes. I’ve written something about the method elsewhere, but it’s fairly standard stuff.
It’s not terribly surprising that there are similar numbers of people in the four corners of the plot (and that there are no very obvious clusters), but this isn’t an inevitable feature of the method — see what happens when you apply this to MPs’ voting records.
Peter 04.16.05 at 3:25 pm
Okay, that does answer my question, but to go on from there: isn’t there a methodological problem in deliberately designing it to maximise the variance along both axes? Perhaps – contrary to a lot of fashionable (and often self-serving) protestations – politics really does continue to exist along a one dimensional left/right spectrum, at least when it comes to the great majority of voters? And therefore using a system that maximises values along two separate axes misses this simpler truth?
For example, wouldn’t it be possible to produce a Z-axis for certain values? Most obviously, you could have the economic scale on X, the cultural scale on Y and the foreign policy/internationalist scale along its own Z axis. Or you could have whatever values and issues would be needed to maximise the variance on all three axes. And then you’d have eight boxes instead of four, in many ways even more descriptive than one which lumps crime, abortion and the EU together on one scale while Iraq and economic freedom bunch up on the other. But would it represent how real people think about politics and how people vote?
Chris Lightfoot 04.16.05 at 7:05 pm
Well, the idea of maximising the variance along the axes is to form the smallest possible good summary of people’s positions. So your position on the first axis gives quite a lot of information about your position, and giving your position on the second axis adds a bit more, and so forth.
The method does produce as many axes as there are questions (32, in this case) but very few of them are important (in the sense of explaining a significant amount of the variance in the whole sample). In fact on strictly statistical terms the second one is only of marginal significance, but its resemblance to the neoliberal/Economist position and its opposite is so striking that it seemed a useful and interesting thing to leave in.
(NB also that the axes that come out of the method are independent — for the respondents in the sample, and therefore hopefully for the population as a whole, there’s no correlation at all between the x- and y-positions.)
Peter 04.16.05 at 8:27 pm
Doesn’t all this suggest, then, that the one-dimensional axis is alive and well? I’m not saying you have made any claim to the contrary: it’s partly because you keep minimising the importance of the second axis that I ask. Doesn’t this effort simply demonstrate once again that there is a pretty reliable 1D axis determining how people vote, and one easily recognisable as a left/right split in a traditional mould going right back to pre-Revolutionary France?
This is something I’ve noticed with past efforts at 2D political spectra: they tend to prove the utility of the 1D left/right model because the second axis is invariably almost useless/superfluous.
Chris Lightfoot 04.17.05 at 6:10 am
Well, a first axis is certainly alive and well, in some sense; I don’t think anyone has identified it as consisting in the particular set of issues which we have. But a person’s position on that axis doesn’t very strongly determine how they vote; at lots of different places on the axis people are more-or-less equally likely to vote for any of the major parties (see this plot).
As for whether the second axis is useless or superfluous… well, I don’t think so. One very striking observation about the first axis is that the war in Iraq — which you might identify as a defining issue of the past few years — hardly matters at all to people’s position on it. But it figures highly on the second. And the people who care about Iraq are also the people who are likely to care about free trade, free markets, privatisation and so forth. And they do so quite independently of the position they take up on the first axis, which is (in some general sense) all about views of outsiders. That’s interesting and surprising (and I don’t really understand it yet).
abb1 04.17.05 at 8:44 am
Well, in the US a significant number of ‘free market’ libertarians (anarcho-capitalist style) are fervently against the war (and not only Iraq war but often the Afghan war too): Harry Browne, Ron Paul, Justin Raimondo, etc. And not just against the war, but passionately, obsessively against it. So, something doesn’t add up here. Unless the British anarcho-capitalists are completely different, which would be odd.
Chris Lightfoot 04.17.05 at 1:24 pm
Well, the actual fraction of libertarians in the UK population is tiny. You might not get that impression from rumours on the internets, because they tend to be pretty noisy, but it is nevertheless true. And the people who are at the extreme positive (“right”) end of the second axis aren’t “free market libertarians” or “anarcho-capitalists”; they’re more likely to be Thatcherites or people like Oliver Kamm. NB that if you are at the positive end of the second axis you are likely to disagree with the statement, “The government is mostly interested in helping itself, not ordinary people” — that doesn’t strike me as a classical libertarian position.
“Unless the British anarcho-capitalists are completely different [from US libertarians], which would be odd.”
Why would that be odd?
Peter 04.17.05 at 1:48 pm
I’m finding all this very interesting. I hope this thread doesn’t disappear too fast because every post brings up more questions.
You say an axis is clearly visible, but seem reluctant to say it’s necessarily the same as the traditional 1D left/right spectrum. But surely the positions are all very easily recognisable in that context? And would have been decades ago? Your use of people like Polly Toynbee as handy stereotypes of one extreme is a pretty strong testament to this.
On the correlation between support for the Iraq War and support for free trade and privatisation, I am going to offend a lot of people – especially on this site – by suggesting this explanation. But I think The Economist reader/believer may explain more than you realise. Could it be that the correlation is due to supporters of both tending to be those well informed about international affairs and about economics?
There are intelligent people who hate globalisation and capitalism, but they tend to be historians or sociologists. University economics departments are almost to a man filled with people who support the free market – free trade and globalisation in particular.
Equally, it’s not difficult to look at over 1,500 coalition troops dead (and perhaps 100,000 dead Iraqi civilians) and see the Iraq War as wrong. In that sense, retrospective opposition to the war is the default, uninformed position. But it takes a special amount of knowledge to understand why for the sake of a stable world order in the post-9/11 environment it was necessary to put out of action a man who was flouting the international community and frankly made a fool out of the Americans ever since February 1991, and certainly throughout the Clinton years. How many would know of how skilfully North Korea would wait until problems occurred with Iraq before kicking off a new tantrum and causing more trouble of its own, making clear that solving any issue with North Korea meant first removing Saddam? And so on.
These are positions that correlate very well to a considerable knowledge and understanding of economics and international affairs. In other words, the sort of person who read the Economist every week for the past five years.
Peter 04.17.05 at 1:56 pm
Well, the actual fraction of libertarians in the UK population is tiny. You might not get that impression from rumours on the internets, because they tend to be pretty noisy, but it is nevertheless true. And the people who are at the extreme positive (“rightâ€) end of the second axis aren’t “free market libertarians†or “anarcho-capitalistsâ€; they’re more likely to be Thatcherites or people like Oliver Kamm.
Evidence? It is, after all, often suggested that lots of Tory voters, and potential Tories, hate the Daily Mail/Eurosceptic/family values side of conservatism, and would much prefer the main party of the Right to be a sort of cosmopolitan liberal party that cuts taxes now and then. I don’t want this, so I actually hope you are right (and common sense experience suggests it too). But I’m interested in why you make this claim with such confidence.
The most common reason given for the need for a 2D political spectrum is that it doesn’t account for those who are socially liberal and fiscally conservative, or vice versa. If there are few such people about (again, something common sense experience suggests to me) then it’s not much of an argument. So I’d like to hear more on this.
abb1 04.17.05 at 2:04 pm
Well, I guess I just can’t imagine that anarcho-capitalist ideology (or any anarchist ideology for that matter) has such strong national flavors. Especially considering that US and UK cultures are not exactly strikingly different.
abb1 04.17.05 at 2:14 pm
These are positions that correlate very well to a considerable knowledge and understanding of economics and international affairs. In other words, the sort of person who read the Economist every week for the past five years.
Right: the labels on the Y axis should obviously read: “smart/informed” going up and “stupid/ignorant” downward.
Chris Lightfoot 04.17.05 at 2:53 pm
‘”Well, the actual fraction of libertarians in the UK population is tiny.”
‘Evidence?’
The fraction of the population who:
– disagree with all of: “The government should give more aid to poor countries”, “Income tax should go up to pay for better public services”, “There are some sexual acts which are immoral, even between consenting adults”, and “We should tax certain imported goods to protect British jobs in industries that produce those goods”; and
– agree with all of: “There are drugs which are currently banned which should be legalised”, “The quality of our public services will improve if people are given the right to choose between different service providers”, “Most people should take responsibility for saving enough for their retirement, rather than relying on the Government to pay a big enough pension to live on” and “In general, private companies are run more efficiently than public services”
is 0.6%. I think that, of the statements we asked about, those eight are a reasonable statement of the classical socially and economically “libertarian” position. Obviously asking for appropriate agreement/disagreement with all of them is a pretty stringent requirement, but then libertarians are supposed to be philosophically consistent, right?
If we look for the right position with six out of those eight, the fraction rises to 6%. That’s probably bigger than the current Labour lead, but then I suspect all those people are voting Tory anyway.
(And on the meaning of the second axis.)
“These are positions that correlate very well to a considerable knowledge and understanding of economics and international affairs.”
Yeah, that’s one way of looking at it. (It rather supposes that the position of the Economist is always the correct one given the evidence. I’m not sure I’d like to argue that in general.)
Peter 04.17.05 at 3:19 pm
Abb1, that’s not what I said.
Chris, are the 0.6% and the 6% from a YouGov poll or from those who took the test online?
Basically, though, I agree with your conclusion. I know when discussing it with Essex University’s David Sanders, he described most people as being somewhere in the middle on the libertarian/authoritarian social scale, and then numbers branching out a bit. It’s pretty much what one would intuitively expect, except when you consider how much media commentary tends to be divided between the extremes of either end. ‘Social moderates’ who might agree with 3 to 5 of those eight statements may be the great majority of voters, but not many public figures who comment on social issues leap out as their spokesmen. In medialand, it’s more an all out war between the Charles Murrays and Melanie Phillipses on one side and the Johann Haris and Peter Tatchells on the other. Maybe social moderates just aren’t as interested in such issues as militant gay rights or pro-life activists, and write about them and think about them a lot less.
On the other point, obviously the Economist is not always right. But it’s worth asking why the war on Iraq was so widely seen as necessary by the informed political establishment. Why is protectionism, similarly, something shunned without question by all mainstream politicians?
Peter 04.17.05 at 3:23 pm
Also, issues like abortion, homosexual marriage, EU membership etc. are more or less binary, so it’s quite difficult to write in defence of a ‘moderate’ position that is Eurosceptic but doesn’t quite favour pulling out, or uncomfortable about abortion but wary of any legal restrictions. But defending the 0 or the 1 in either case is much easier, even if the great majority are in between, very conflicted and cautious.
abb1 04.17.05 at 3:34 pm
Economist is probably always right if you’re a proponent of the neo-liberal ideology, so there you go.
Chris Lightfoot 04.17.05 at 5:57 pm
“Chris, are the 0.6% and the 6% from a YouGov poll or from those who took the test online?”
From the original YouGov sample.
“… it’s worth asking why the war on Iraq was so widely seen as necessary by the informed political establishment.”
Groupthink and politicians’ gullibility in the face of secret knowledge — the same reason we’re getting ID cards and arbitrary detention on the orders of a minister.
“Why is protectionism, similarly, something shunned without question by all mainstream politicians?”
Well, except for George W Bush and many others….
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