Politics by the Numbers

I took a political test that Josiah found. At first, I was 74 social and 85 fiscal. I read over it again, and realized that while the answers were limiting, I hadn't selected the “best” answers. So I took the test again and came out with:

On Non-Fiscal Issues, you rank as a Strong Conservative (85).
On Fiscal Issues, you rank as a Strong Conservative (90).

After taking that, I thought I'd try the Political Compass again. I've taken the political compass a number of times and found it to be a bit more of a “complete” view of politics than a lot of polls. As you'll see below, I'm almost centrist according to it.

The political compass divides views into a four way map with coordinates rather than just a two way spectrum in the following manner.

My “score” is:
Economic Left/Right: 1.88
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -0.97

That makes me just slightly below the middle on the up/down social scale between Libertarian and Authoritarian views and just a bit more skewed from center to the right on the economic scale. I guess that makes me a “compassionate conservative.”

Okay, one more way to look at this, courtesy of Christopher:

“32 percent liberal, 68 percent conservative - compared to 73 percent liberal, 27 percent conservative” You can click the link to view my full results and take the quiz for yourself. (The comparison part is based on the poll's ability to compare your views with someone else's. I chose to enter my father's views, as best I understand them, as the second person.)

Interesting. So I took three polls. The first puts me far the right, the second puts me just right of center and the third puts me somewhat in the middle of the right (half way between ultra-conservative and centrist). The latter two are closer together and I think they my corroborate what I generally held to be true: I'm a conservative, but not an ultra-conservative. Furthermore, I generally am slightly more liberal economically than socially (mostly due to less conviction about the issues there, I suspect), although I lean to the right on both.

Finally, the last quiz also includes a personality segment:
There has been much research on how people describe others, and five major dimensions of human personality have been found. They are often referred to as the OCEAN model of personality, because of the acronym from the names of the five dimensions. Your specific personality indicates that the following attributes will most likely describe you well:
You enjoy having novel experiences and seeing things in new ways.
You are neither organized or disorganized.
You tend to shy away from social situations.
You tend to consider the feelings of others.
You are generally relaxed.