Political Compass: Part I

I ran across a site the other day that really caught my attention. The site is Political Compass.

Taken from their site: "Welcome to The Political Compass.
There's abundant evidence for the need of it. The old one-dimensional categories of 'right' and 'left' , established for the seating arrangement of the French National Assembly of 1789, are overly simplistic for today's complex political landscape. For example, who are the 'conservatives' in today's Russia? Are they the unreconstructed Stalinists, or the reformers who have adopted the right-wing views of conservatives like Margaret Thatcher?"

I agree. There is more to a person's politics than their economic beliefs. In any event, the site offers a roughly 60 question test for determining your political beliefs in a two-dimensional form. There is the traditional left and right for the economic scale, but the addition is up and down for a social scale.

Therefore, I decided to plot out where the current American political parties are located. I took educated guesses and used the site's information regarding political leaders to determine the locations. Click on the image to enlarge.



I decided to plot the site's information about current and former world leaders, both national and religious. I found it interesting to see how close John Kerry was to George W. Bush. If John Kerry was labeled as a left wing liberal during the 2004 Presidential election, then I must be a communist. Or perhaps, that was all just propaganda. Click on the image to enlarge.