Comment on Vote Compass Australia 2025 - Australia Votes

• Zagorath@aussie.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  You’re reading it as an upside down version of the normal Political Compass, which would make sense (though not sure why you’d flip it rather than just using the Political Compass as it is).

  But if you read the axes as they’re actually labelled by the ABC, the x-axis is labelled “social” and the y-axis is “economic”.

  source

  • eureka@aussie.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    For what it’s worth, any political compass is a highly flawed way of modeling politics so I wouldn’t think about it too much. If they don’t give a concrete definition of “left” or “right” or units of measurement then it can’t possibly be more than vibes and feelings. Policies don’t ‘average out’ on these metrics, and often there are both ‘left’ and ‘right’ disagreements with a policy, especially given specific phrasing in a quiz where questions are sometimes loaded.

    As a test (these aren’t my actual politics!) I managed, first time, to get this alignment when only agreeing with Labor on 5/30 (16%) of policies, being at least two positions away from them on 12 policies (e.g. ‘agree’ when they were ‘disagree’, or ‘much [x]’ when ALP was neutral), without having unreasonable or contradictory politics. In fact, my quiz answers agreed with Greens as much, based on their own metric.

    THE ONE TRUE LEFT-CENTRIST

    Image

    And, for what it’s worth, my actual honest result was this, putting me slightly right of Greens, despite a regular political analysis putting me firmly on the economic left of them - they just didn’t ask questions outside the Overton window.

    THE WORKERS MUST ASK PEACEFULLY FOR PERMISSION TO OPERATE THE MEANS OF PRODUCTION

    Image

    (@GreenMartian@lemmy.dbzer0.com, @zero_gravitas@aussie.zone)

    source

    • Zagorath@aussie.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      they just didn’t ask questions outside the Overton window.

      Sure, but that’s a feature, not a bug, in this case. The ABC isn’t trying to create the One Political Compass To Place You For All Time. They’re trying to show you where you stand relative to the parties on the issues being discussed this election campaign. It may also be worth doing their optional step of weighting the questions by importance, to make it a little more useful.

      source

      • eureka@aussie.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

        The ABC isn’t trying to create the One Political Compass To Place You For All Time. They’re trying to show you where you stand relative to the parties on the issues being discussed this election campaign.

        That’s true, and it does an alright job of that. And since the tool doesn’t really take independents and minor parties into consideration, who might have such policies, there’s no point in asking them anyway. My post is more a critique of trying to visualise the results in the style of a political compass.

        source
  • GreenMartian@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    I can see how it can be confusing. There probably are better ways to label this.

    But basically, the lines are not axes. They are quadrant “dividers”. So the line labelled “Economic” divides the Left and the Right half. So your position is further left economically than the Greens.

    source
  • zero_gravitas@aussie.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    The labels in the middle of the sides are confusing, but if you focus on the labels with the arrows at the corners you’ll see the x-axis is economic, and the y-axis is social:

    ‘Left’ points left

    Image

    ‘Right’ points right

    Image

    ‘Progressive’ points up

    Image

    ‘Conservative’ points down

    Image

    (though not sure why you’d flip it rather than just using the Political Compass as it is).

    Yeah, I guess ‘Progressive’ and ‘Conservative’ aren’t exactly ‘Libertarian’ and ‘Authoritarian’ on the usual compass.

    source