Lawrence Solum and Tim Lambert have compiled lists of a number of bloggers who’ve recently taken a 2-dimensional political ideology test that’s been around for a while. (It’s a version of the old Nolan Chart, but intended to avoid the pro-libertarian bias many such quizzes have.) Unsurprisingly, I come out pretty strongly libertarian anyway.

Now, I have plenty of problems with this particular quiz as well. A lot of the question probe what are basically personal aesthetic preferences that don’t necessarily translate into a political position. Others have questionable assumptions built into them. The very first, for instance, asks whether globalization should benefit “humanity” or “trans-national corporations.” Now, what I want to know is… who looks at that question and says “fuck humanity… it’s all about the corporations!” The most rabid free-marketeer on earth is going to opt for “humanity.” It tells you nothing useful about someone’s politics, because the dispositive factor in terms of the actual positions people take is going to be the extent to which someone believes these things are in conflict, and that vigorous intervention or regulation can effectively shift the outcome in favor of “humanity.”

The failings of this particular quiz notwithstanding, I’m a bit puzzled by the reactions of folks like Matt Yglesias and Brian Weatherson, who object to the 2-D schema as a whole. Some of their points are certainly well taken. Any model is going to oversimplify in some sense—that’s why it’s a model, not a detailed position statement crafted on an individual basis. This one certainly conflates a number of different issues under the rubrics of “economic” and “personal” freedom… and indeed, assumes that relative “freedom” (or “intervention”) is the appropriate dimension along which to measure. I’ve had friends with strongly held but highly nuanced economic views come out as mushy middle-of-the-roaders who don’t care much about such matters because their views are driven by policy specifics rather than an indiscriminate “regulation, yay!” or “regulation, boo!” ideology. Nevertherless, it seems obvious to me that this is, for all that, a huge improvement over an increasingly nonsensical 1-D gradient. Contra Matt, I find nothing particularly “elegant” about the awkward squishing of the left/right schema. Every criticism of the 2-D model applies tenfold to the 1-D version… so why isn’t the former an improvement?