Comment on Vote Compass Australia 2025 - Australia Votes
Zagorath@aussie.zone 1 week agoYou’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”.
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.
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
‘Right’ points right
‘Progressive’ points up
‘Conservative’ points down
(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.
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
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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
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(@GreenMartian@lemmy.dbzer0.com, @zero_gravitas@aussie.zone)
Zagorath@aussie.zone 1 week ago
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.
eureka@aussie.zone 1 week ago
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.