I almost don't want to post it in this section since the test is more or less a real thing... but it's still an online test, for whatever that's worth.
Here's an interesting detail that shows the general balance of states/senators as of 2008 at least:
What's scary is that even the Democrats (blue dots) in the United States still lean way to the Right on the spectrum. Even Obama ranks up there on the Authoritarian/Right scale and people in this country give him shit for his Liberal views.
Economic Left/Right: -8.25
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -7.23
this interests me because i had no idea i am so politically extreme but now looking at this i can see that i do have extreme political ideas. while i was answering the questions i expected to get a more moderate result.
A lot of people tend to assume they're in one direction more than the other, until they think about the specifics. I also think that has a lot to do with the political direction this country (US) has taken as well. Saying "socialist" or "liberal" still has a bad connotation for some, so they just assume their more of a "moderate".
Unfortunately, if they assume they're at a 0/0 and most of the candidates running are at a +/+ (Blue) then they compromise and settle for the least +/+ of them all. I'd like to think if people realized they ranked highly in one of the "-" scores, they'd start to consider one of the "other" parties or more extreme candidates for office instead. If you averaged out an extreme -/- candidate with the +/+ influence already in Washington, then you'd end up with a more "moderate" candidate in the end.
If Ron Paul won the presidential vote in 2008, it wouldn't mean we'd all be gun toting, trigger-happy militia members today. It just means the scale would have slid down towards the more Libertarian end, but not changed the entire country overnight. If Kucinich won the race in 2008, it doesn't mean we'd all be granola eating, tree hugging hippies either; we'd just be a lot closer to that center mark today.
Here's the one picture I feel sums up US politics perfectly:
This test came up in TC, so I thought I'd res this thread for a bit to post my results.
[h=2]Economic Left/Right: -5.88
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -8.15[/h]