The political compass, explained

Online political quizzes often place you on a grid with two axes rather than a single line. The best known calls itself the Political Compass. The idea behind it is older than the internet, and it starts with where people sat in a room in Versailles.

Where left and right come from

The left-right axis is “generally dated to 1789, when the French National Assembly met in Versailles,” according to Encyclopaedia Britannica. The delegates were divided over how much authority King Louis XVI should keep, and, as History.com tells it, “the anti-royalist revolutionaries seated themselves to the presiding officer’s left, while the more conservative, aristocratic supporters of the monarchy gathered to the right.”

The labels stuck in France and spread, though they weren’t common in English-speaking countries until the early 20th century. What they stand for has kept changing ever since.

The trouble with one line

A single line forces every political idea into “more left” or “more right,” and some combinations don’t fit. The classic example: the line puts communism and fascism at opposite ends, though, as the political scientist and novelist Jerry Pournelle wrote, “those two have many similarities.” It also leaves no obvious place for someone who wants low taxes and few social rules, or for someone who wants a strong safety net and traditional values.

Adding a second axis: a short history

• Hans Eysenck, 1954. In The Psychology of Politics, the psychologist paired a radicalism-conservatism axis with a second one he called “tough-minded” versus “tender-minded,” meant to capture authoritarianism. As Britannica notes, his model “would classify both” Stalinist communists and Nazis “as extreme examples of ‘tough-mindedness.’” A lecture at Gresham College sums up his point: he “reckoned that there was an equivalent authoritarianism of the left.”
• Jerry Pournelle, early 1960s. His PhD dissertation at the University of Washington argued “that the old left-right category doesn’t really work.” His two axes were “Attitude toward the State” and “Attitude toward Planned Social Progress,” which he described as “rationalism.”
• David Nolan, 1971. The Nolan Chart, first published in January 1971, used economic freedom and personal freedom as its axes. Its purpose, Reason magazine recalled, “was to discredit the typical left-to-right political spectrum as leaving no room for the libertarian position.” Nolan co-founded the Libertarian Party the same year. In 1987 the World’s Smallest Political Quiz added ten questions to his chart.
• The Political Compass, 2001. The website politicalcompass.org, described by The New York Times in 2003 as “a project by Wayne Brittenden, a political journalist in London,” puts economic left and right on one axis and authoritarian versus libertarian on the other. “Our essential point is that Left and Right, although far from obsolete, are essentially a measure of economics,” the site explains.

What the research says

Academic studies of American opinion broadly back the idea that views on the economy and on social questions are separate things.

• In 1981, Stuart Lilie and William Maddox described four belief systems in American survey data: liberal, conservative, populist and libertarian.
• A 2006 Pew Research Center analysis found 18% liberals, 15% conservatives, 16% populists and 9% libertarians, plus a large non-ideological group, 42%, it labeled “ambivalents.”
• Shawn Treier and D. Sunshine Hillygus found in 2009 that “the belief systems of the mass public remain multidimensional, with many in the electorate holding liberal preferences on one dimension and conservative preferences on another.” Some 44% of self-described moderates were cross-pressured in this way.
• Stanley Feldman and Christopher Johnston concluded in 2014 that “two dimensions—economic and social ideology—are the minimum needed to account for domestic policy preferences.”
• Lee Drutman’s 2017 study of 2016 voters found 28.9% were “populists,” liberal on economics and conservative on identity issues, and 3.8% the reverse.

There’s a counterpoint. A 2023 study in the American Political Science Review found that a single left-right line describes the policy views of most Americans well, about 73%. But roughly one in five hold views that no single line captures.

So why does politics still sound one-dimensional? Partly because politicians are. Votes in Congress have lined up along a single liberal-conservative dimension through most of American history, according to the Voteview project that scores them. A 2012 study by Edward Carmines and colleagues put it plainly: “while American political elites compete across a single dimension of conflict, the American people organize their policy attitudes around two distinct dimensions, one economic and one social” (The Forum).

Where two-axis maps fall short

• The axes depend on who draws them. Eysenck chose radicalism and tough-mindedness, Pournelle the state and planned progress, Nolan two kinds of freedom. Each choice sorts the same ideas differently.
• Quizzes can tilt. A 2009 study simulated 500,000 versions of a voting-advice quiz and found that “the specific selection of statements has a considerable impact” on the advice it produced (West European Politics). Britannica notes that the Political Compass in particular has been “criticized as a tool for propagating libertarian ideas.” The site’s own answer to complaints of slanted questions: “Most of them are slanted! Some right-wingers accuse us of a leftward slant. Some left-wingers accuse us of a rightward slant” (FAQ).
• The labels move. “Libertarian” was first used politically in 19th-century France for communist anarchists, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes. Hyrum and Verlan Lewis go further, arguing in The Myth of Left and Right that the positions grouped as left and right have shifted in “unpredictable and even contradictory ways.”
• Two may not be enough, and some people have no fixed pattern. Pournelle himself said he was “certain there are other important ones.” And political scientists Donald Kinder and Nathan Kalmoe argue that “real liberals and real conservatives are found in impressive numbers only among those who are deeply engaged in political life” (Neither Liberal nor Conservative).

How We the Panel’s map works

We the Panel uses two axes too, chosen for how Americans argue about politics today: the economy, from shared responsibility to self-reliance, and society, from change to tradition. Three positions on each give nine types. A third scale, trust in the political system, adds a trait rather than a third axis.

We’ve tried to learn from the criticisms above. On each scale some statements lean left and some lean right, so agreeing with everything puts you in the middle, not on one side. If a statement makes no sense to you, you can say so and it’s left out instead of counted as neutral. The cut-offs are fixed and the same for everyone, and our method page explains how it all works. It never tells you how to vote.

For what the surveys say about the people one line misses, see Liberal, conservative, or neither?