Political compass

The political compass is a multi-axis political model, used by the website of the same name, to label or organise political thought on two dimensions. In its selection and representation of these two dimensions, it is similar to the Nolan Chart and Pournelle Chart. The term "Political Compass" is claimed as a trademark by the British website Pace News Limited, which uses responses to a set of 61 propositions to rate political ideology on two axes: Economic (Left–Right) and Social (Authoritarian–Libertarian). The site also includes an explanation of the two-axis system they use, a few charts which place various past and present political figures according to their estimation, and reading lists for each of the main political orientations.

The underlying theory of the Political Compass is that political ideology may be better measured along two separate and independent axes. The Economic (Left–Right) axis measures one's opinion of how the economy should be run: "left" is defined as the desire for the economy to be run by a cooperative collective agency (which can mean the state, but can also mean a network of communes), while "right" is defined as the desire for the economy to be left to the devices of competing individuals and organizations. The other axis (Authoritarian–Libertarian) measures one's political opinions in a social sense, regarding the amount of personal freedom that one would allow: "libertarianism" is defined as the belief that personal freedom should be maximised, while "authoritarianism" is defined as the belief that authority and tradition should be obeyed.

The labels given to the different fields and axes on the compass are based on long-standing terminology, which can be applied to almost all Western democracies, including the politics of the United States.

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