The Political Compass

While surfing a fellow Tweeter's blog, I found a link to a great site. The Political Compass explains itself as "a case of a journalist and an academic working on the inadequacies of simple left-right political identities." It's great --- a political site with scholarly understanding, historical accuracy, AND Canadian spelling! Click here to go take their questionnaire.

Here's where I fell on their spectrum:

Clockwise from the top right (Authoritarianism), it makes sense to think of the points of the cross as Fascism, Neo-Liberalism, Anarchism, and Communism. The vertical axis is the social dimension, the horizontal axis is the economic scale.

Here's another chart they have of international contemporary leaders:

Neoliberalism, and the rise of curtailed civil liberties, is responsible for the fact that most major political parties in North America would fall into the upper right quadrant. The site also plots the major parties in the Canadian elections of 2005 and 2008 --- and it's interesting to see how they've shifted.