25th June 2007 Stumble it!

Bloggers, Politics, Libertarians, Totalitarians

posted in Politics by themaiden |

I wandered upon what I have to assume is a now defunct project– it was last updated in February of 2006. This is unfortunate. It was an interesting project.

The Blogosphere Political Compass Project is graphing the approximate political affiliation of bloggers from all corners of the Internet. The chart below shows the relative positions of the bloggers who have responded thus far; graphing is done two-dimensionally in order to show both economic (liberal vs. conservative) and social (authoritarian vs. libertarian) leanings.

The Zoo: The Blogosphere Political Compass Project

The interesting thing about it is the chart that the project generated. (Because of the apparent defunct nature of the project and hence the possibility that the chart will vanish from the web, I’ve linked to copies of the originals.)

chart

Notice how those who score toward the liberal side– appropriately the left side– almost all score toward the libertarian side as well. (I fit in this category, scoring “Economic Left/Right: -4.25″ and “Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -6.62″.) Approximately half score pretty strongly libertarian and those few not scoring libertarian do not score very highly authoritarian.

Of those scoring conservative, half or more (I’d bet ‘more’, but no I did not count all the little dots. I’d go insane.) score on the authoritarian side, and most score less libertarian than the liberals.

In other words, liberals score higher on ‘personal freedom’ than do conservatives. Conservatives score higher on ‘government meddling’ than do liberals. This is really the reverse of what the rhetoric would have us believe. Aren’t the lib’rals supposed to be the commies and the socialists and the ones pushing for government control of everything? Aren’t the lib’rals the ones enamored of the nanny state and big government? Aren’t the liberals the one’s with a disdain for personal freedoms?

Of course the whole analysis is contingent upon the accuracy of the project chart and upon the quality the test from which the data points are drawn. Still, interesting results.

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  1. 1 On December 2nd, 2007, Carnival of Liberty | Reason and Capitalism said:

    […] presents Bloggers, Politics, Libertarians, Totalitarians | hell’s handmaiden posted at Hell’s […]

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