Political quizzes are a bit of a guilty pleasure of mine. I really enjoy getting my beliefs distilled into a handful of labels, and getting forced to think about issues I may not have thought about that thoroughly. I often take issue with the wording of various questions though, and certainly have opinions on some quizzes being better than others.
Ultimately, the reason I consider these quizzes a guilty pleasure is because the results shouldn't really be used for anything. I believe we should vote on the issues directly, and any form of Representative Democracy is an unnecessary abstraction. The labels may be useful as a mnemonic, but not as useful as the individual answers and the justifications behind those answers. Plus, people are going to interpret the questions differently, especially when it comes to understanding terms like liberalism, freedom, or merit.
With all that said, here I'll discuss some tests I've taken, the results I've gotten l, and my overall thoughts on it. I'll include the dates taken so they can map to My Political Journey.
Made by the six triangles creator, I really like this test! It actually might be my favorite. It novelly gives you multiple positions to take on a given issue, rather than a statement you can agree or disagree with. I overall really liked the choices, and nearly always felt one represented my views.
I like the results I got on 2024-09-06. I was surprised at my government value being just "direct democracy", when the way I define my views on Government in My Political Beliefs (at the time of taking the test), which I believe I reflected accurately in my responses here, would probably include at least some points on anarchism and confederationism. That said, I liked these results so much that they inspired me to write that page on my political beliefs, which takes clear inspiration from this test.
I was intrigued by Six Triangles' idea of replacing axes with triangles, although some of the additional points seem a bit redundant, or just acted as a disguised additional axis. For example, the truth corner of personal freedom is not really related to the axis of freedom vs security. It could have easily been its own axis specific to misinformation. Similarly, I think the burden corner of equality is going to be highly correlated to their equality of opportunity score. Others, however, really benefit from the third point, like economy being split up into laissez faire capitalism, "well regulated" capitalism, and socialism.
Unfortunately, I found a lot of the questions to be poorly worded or vague. For example, I disagree with the statement "The government occasionally needs to do things which aren't popular for the good of its people" because popular isn't sufficient, but in a system that requires unanimity (or near unanimity), I'd argue everything that gets passed is for the good of the people, based off the values and considerations of those specific people. That nuance doesn't carry over if I just select "disagree" though. They also have the statement "Small government is usually better than big government" without any context for what big vs small mean in this context: number of employees? Amount of nationalized services? Number of constituents? Amount of regulations? This distinction matters for getting (more) accurate results.
The results from taking it on 2024-09-05 were quite satisfying to go through. I particularly enjoyed being called a "Fanatic anti-imperialist". The main score I disagreed with was the government triangle; I would've preferred a higher minarchy score.
I took the SapplyValues quiz on 2024-05-07:
I took the 4Orbs quiz on 2023-07-09:
I like that this quiz gives live feedback, as it helped me introspect on the differences between my self-reported positions versus positions political quizzes assign me (for example, I usually think I'm way closer to anarchist than these tests usually put me, although funnily enough this quiz probably gave me one of the strongest anarchist score of any test I've taken). I also like that the creator is an anarchist themselves, which is likely uncommon across political quiz writers. I also felt like a lot of the questions were phrased in quite interesting ways.
I took the spekr quiz on 2023-05-17:
I really didn't like this quiz. I think its overly-constrained to the range of discussion considered politically viable in America, and therefore didn't ask any questions about abolishing the state or replacing corporations with worker's co-operatives. I disagree with my results here moreso than any other political quiz I've taken.
I took the isidewith quiz on 2023-05-03:
I got quite different results on 2016-10-30, pre-radicalization:
I took the political compass quiz on 2023-02-19:
I'd gotten similar results on 2022-06-15:
I only took the short version, but here are my results from taking the 9Axes quiz on 2022-06-15: