The Political Compass Test and the Death of Politics
Design courtesy of Vivian Zar Ni.
For those who are unfamiliar, the Political Compass Test is an online quiz composed of “policy-oriented” questions which, when answered, place respondents on a two-dimensional framework of political ideology, instead of the traditional left-right paradigm. Designed by historian and journalist Wayne Brittenden, the test, at its conception, was intended to be an introductory tool for those interested in politics. The website to take the Compass Test is almost as old as the internet itself, appearing first in 2001.
What makes this test particularly interesting as an object of analysis for me is that it has been a relatively innocuous yet persistent accompaniment to my interest in politics. I’ve taken the quiz hundreds of times. As per the political theory geek tradition, I remember having my sense of politics completely startled and transformed after a single piece of media, only to take the quiz with haste and see into which new box it would shove me.
Over time, though, I've come to the realisation that the whole thing is a bit of a meme. It is impossible to place every single political ideology on a two-dimensional plane. However, the problem is not really the number of dimensions, as Brittenden seems to have in mind. Yes, you can turn every single policy issue into a dimension, and still fail at your attempt to be comprehensive. Different political ideologies must be understood not as a response to paradigms set by contemporary politics, but as a way to construct new paradigms and provide alternative approaches to understand political phenomena altogether.
And I had the impression that everyone–excluding certain self-proclaimed political theory experts from Reddit–was on the same page. This was until a friend from Canada told me that the “compass” is one of the foundations of the high school civics curriculum. I was a bit baffled. I never took high school-level education on politics to be the cornerstone of rigorous inquiry, but this completely liquidates the discipline. In class, they would plot historical authors from different centuries on the same graph, compare them to each other, and even go so far as to analyze them alongside contemporary political parties in Canada. Perhaps Trump was right; maybe Canadians should be liberated from the tyranny of their education system.
This is not an isolated case, however. The political compass symbolises the ultimate mistake of approaching the study of political ideology in terms of a dichotomy. And though in Alberta, it may have taken the most abhorrent and infernal form, the rest of the world is not free of its curse. Every time you hear a classmate describe a political author using words such as “individualism” or “collectivism,” you are listening to someone guilty of the same sin.
Seeing the stakes, I decided to dig deeper into the case to see whether the “political compass-ists” had a foothold in academia.
The first to use a double-axis model to categorise how individuals engage with politics was Hans Eysenck in his essay “Politics and Personality” in 1956. He argued that politics existed in two dichotomies: you were either a “conservative” or a “radical,” and either “authoritarian” or “democratic.” Fascism was placed on the first quadrant (+x, +y) of the Cartesian plane, communism on the second (-x, +y), whereas liberalism was placed on the negative y-axis below the origin. On the whole, Eysenck’s theory was quite similar to Brittenden’s political compass, where the y-axis refers to authoritarianism and the x-axis refers to the left-right divide.
Figure 1: Eysenck Chart
However, it is crucial to understand that Eysenck’s primary aim in developing his model was not to create a comprehensive framework for categorizing political ideologies. He had a background in psychology, and he was primarily interested in the relationships “between personality, social attitudes, and political action,” as the title of his essay also seems to suggest. Indeed, in the aftermath of World War II, the study of political personalities was a prominent field, and his work was very much a product of its time. Terms like “radical” and “conservative” functioned more as personality traits than as well-defined political ideologies. In a similar vein, his depiction of ‘democratic’ and ‘tender-minded’ political dispositions mirrors a recurring assumption from personality psychology, where higher levels of ‘openness to experience’ are conceptually equivalent to more left-leaning political views. In this sense, the double-axis model originated as a personality test of sorts—akin to the quizzes one might find on BuzzFeed today.
The ultimate conclusion Eysenck reached was that the type of personality interested in the politics of fascism was similar to those who were interested in the politics of communism, despite both ideologies standing at opposite ends of the traditional single-axis model. This differentiation between the “reasonable” left/right-wing and the “unreasonable” left/right-wing, i.e., the authoritarian and the democratic left/right wing, is an element that was foundational to the dual-axis models from this time. Post-World War II politics came with this necessity; the so-called liberal “left” wanted to be differentiated from authoritarian models of the “left,”—for obvious reasons—and the same was true, perhaps even more urgently, for the democratic right. On one hand, this distinction was an ideological and pragmatic response to the crisis of authoritarianism in the 20th century. On the other hand, whether fascism and communism are somehow similar political ideologies–as the model indicates–is a question worthy of a book in itself. As we will observe, most double-axis models of categorisation aim to establish this.
The first one to think of a dual-axis model as a legitimate political theory, as opposed to a psychological one, was Jerry Pournelle in his doctoral dissertation from 1963. This theory later appeared in his rather surprising work titled Imperial Stars: Volume 1, with its description indicating that its “Stories deal with interstellar barbarians, spacefaring civilizations.” If this book must be taken seriously as an object of analysis, as it appears to be the first political and ideological foundations of the dual-axis theory; its thesis argues that all political ideologies can be understood through a dual axis plane, with the y-axis ranging from “rationalism” to “irrationalism,” and the x-axis referring to the degree of desired state authority. A part of Pournelle’s goal was to overcome the seeming contradictions in the traditional left-right singular axis. Pournelle explained that libertarians, which he considered himself to be, had different political positions from conservatives, despite the traditional singular axis coupling them together. He aimed to create a theoretical model that highlighted this differentiation. Likewise, the model allowed him to couple together fascists and communists despite appearing at the opposite ends of the traditional singular axis.
Figure 2: Pournelle Chart
Now, as much as “rationalism” and “irrationalism” may sound like mere political slander, Pournelle was serious in his attempt to use this model as a legitimate form of political taxonomy. The association between conservatism and irrationalism goes back to the Burkean critique of the Enlightenment. Burke viewed the revolutionary rationalism that was emerging in France at the time of his writings as a force against common sense and religion. He argued that a collective sense of emotional bondage to the past strengthened societies and liberated them, whereas by completely abandoning these intrinsic values, “the French had turned their ancestors to slaves.” There is a case to be made whether this edge of conservatism–even from the standpoint of rhetorical politics–survived to live today, with so many conservatives determined on “destroying” liberals with facts and logic. Brittenden must have asked the same question, given that Pournelle’s “irrational-rational” axis is replaced by a more general “right-left” trajectory in his model. Nonetheless, one can argue that they both seem to be pointing at similar political opposites; the contrast between tradition and emotion-based authentic authority, and reason-based, progressive change. Both models attempt to capture this deeper ideological divide between a worldview rooted in inherited values and intuitions, versus one grounded in abstract reason and individual autonomy.
The dichotomy between freedom and control reflects the 20th-century question of Fordism: whether society and economics should be regulated by an authoritarian state or by private individuals. According to Pournelle’s own theorem, Marx—whose historical materialism reflects “rationalism” and whose goal was to abolish the state, reflects anti-authoritarianism—should have been placed right next to his ideological opposite, Ayn Rand. This is absurd on two levels. First, Rand and Marx are representatives of two completely different thoughts of philosophy, and they seemingly disagree in almost all crucial political definitions, from the transformability of human nature to the role of the state, to freedom. Perhaps more importantly, a paradigmatic comparison between Marx and Rand does not even appear feasible, given that they were responding to completely different crises. Thus, any political theory that attempts to construct a holistic approach to categorizing political ideologies, yet places these two side by side, resembles a science fiction novel rather than a doctoral thesis.
The situation was worse than I had initially imagined. The paper, in order to avoid coupling Marx with Rand, enforced an unfortunate misreading of Marx, whereby Marx is somehow imagined as a pioneer of bureaucratism and is placed on the "statist" end of the model. It is fair to assume that by equating Marxism and Stalinism, Pournelle wanted to force Marx to carry the burden of the failed communist projects in history. As a result, he fails to capture, in his double-axis theorem, that Marx only treated the state as a historical means to the end of freedom (and not an end in itself). Of course, this means that the entire Marxist discussion of proletarian consciousness is liquidated. No point within Pournelle’s political plane that can host Marx’s idea of society’s self-constitution, through which the proletarian class realises that they are the ones who produce and control society, not the arbitrary laws of economics, nor the state. For Marx, the state is a means of transformation, something to be immediately discarded when its purpose has been fulfilled. Instead, throughout Pournelle’s thesis, Marx’s authoritarianism is treated as a given. The paper does not make a single direct reference to any of Marx’s work, leaving me dumbfounded at how this reading of Marx could’ve even come about. The only nuance regarding the issue of Marx’s hostility towards the state is brought up unwillingly in one paragraph:
“…the contemporary American political groups themselves (with some exceptions) do not attach any particular significance to the philosophical theory of the state; the Marxists and the Anarchists have occasionally attempted to make this a topic of debate, but without success. What was once a matter of great importance has become a subject of academic debate, which, fortunately or unfortunately, interests few American politicians and statesmen.”
Why was Marx, whose philosophy was undeniably critical to the development of modern political thought, subjected to misreading for the sake of pragmatic convenience, while Ayn Rand managed to receive an accurate representation in Pournelle’s compass? More importantly, does the theory hold up to itself? If a model is interested in categorising “American political ‘isms’,” as the paper suggests, why is it defining politics simply as a theory of possibility within the bureaucratic system? Are philosophies that are outside of the bureaucratic system not legitimate as ideas within themselves? Is the transformation of society’s political paradigms an unserious goal?
Indeed, if Pournelle’s theory were solely concerned with the inner workings of “American politicians and statesmen,” his theory might have been accurate. However, it fails miserably in its attempt to reconcile with historical authors who were themselves responding to different political crises, and therefore operated in fundamentally different paradigms. Marx was not fundamentally concerned with where his theoretical schema fell in terms of its “rationalism” or “irrationalism;” “authoritarianism” or “anti-authoritarianism.” Whereas the fundamental contemporary political question, one indicated by Pournelle and his supposedly all-encompassing compass, is a question of the seemingly necessary relationships between state institutions and individuals, Marx wrote knowing that the idea of the state was historically contingent altogether!
Here, we embark upon the greatest sin of modern political science: forgetting about our place in the history of ideas. Although not all of us go as far as Fukuyama to declare the Western European model of liberal democracy as the literal “end of history,” political scientists today view human behaviour (and philosophy) as an object of scientific observation, rather than a subject to fundamental transformation. And this sin is not limited to the supposed “scientists.” It permeates the foundations of our engagement with politics. Once again, as Pournelle very clearly puts it, politics is a mere theory of possibility within the bureaucratic system; our philosophy of salvation, of freedom, and of the greater good are bound by their suitability to our inherited bureaucratic system.
Unfortunately for us, those who are unconscious of their history are completely unconscious of their present. In our attempts to relate together Aristotle, Donald Trump, and Rousseau under a single (or a double) political paradigm, we remove them from the political history that they responded to, and make the dangerous assumption that all hitherto political phenomena addressed the same critical issues. This is what I meant by how, no matter how many axes you add to your model, whether it be three or even four, one always falls into the same trap.
This is where the question of “personality science” becomes more pertinent. The lens of personality science essentialises the inherent issues of contemporary politics, much like the dual-axis model. In the same way we inherit political ideas from our personality, we inherit the political system from our ancestors, and we must operate within its boundaries. What none of these authors understand is that the traditional right-left spectrum did not claim to be ideologically comprehensive. It was an attempt to place those who operate within the paradigms of the status quo against those who demand alternative paradigms. Looking through such a lens, every political idea that fits Pournelle’s compass is right-wing.
Yunus Akdal (GS ’26) is a political science major and critical theory enthusiast. Contact if you disagree at ya2545@columbia.edu.