The Political Compass

These days it's getting harder and harder to differentiate political beliefs. Here's an interesting place where you can take a bead on your own political leanings, and find out where some of the great world leaders stand in relationship to you and to each other.

The Political Compass™

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 ?

On the standard left-right scale, how do you distinguish leftists like Stalin and Gandhi? It's not sufficient to say that Stalin was simply more left than Gandhi. There are fundamental political differences between them that the old categories on their own can't explain. Similarly, we generally describe social reactionaries as 'right-wingers', yet that leaves left-wing reactionaries like Robert Mugabe and Pol Pot off the hook.

Go to this link to take a test that will show you were you stand on the Political Compass.

http://www.politicalcompass.org/