With so many people today holding such a wide variety of personal and political opinions, it’s very difficult to draw a line and choose a side. What political ideology are you? Why not take a test, answer a few simple questions about your beliefs, and find out the truth?
1. Pew Research Center
One of the leader opinion research organizations, the Pew Research Center, published its own Political Typology Quiz. This quiz steps you through 17 questions to determine where you fall in the political spectrum. Most of the questions are pretty obvious which side of the aisle they fall on. Questions cover fiscal spending, racial issues, gender issues, environmental regulations, and more. The end result of the test will be a particular label that Pew Research Center created to describe degrees of the political spectrum. The name may not mean much to you, but to see where you fall, just scroll down to see the charts and graphs. The results will show you how you answered versus how the general public answered, as well as which end of the political spectrum you fall on.
2. Youth Leadership
This Youth Leadership quiz is an online resource for Civics Teachers. This page is a tool teachers can use to help students learn where they fall in the political spectrum. It’s also a much easier test to take than most because it’s just a single page with 25 questions you can quickly answer Agree or Disagree to. Questions here aren’t entirely cut and dry. You would need to stop and analyze many of them carefully to guess which end of politics the answer leans to. Because of that, it’s better to go through the questions quickly and answer with your initial gut reaction. This will ensure you’re answering with what you believe, not with how you’d like the test results to go. Select Submit when you’re done, and you’ll get a text explanation of your political leaning. The result will be Liberal, Conservative, or Moderate, with an explanation of what that means. It also lists a couple of politicians with whom your political views align.
3. Individual Differences Research
One of the more scientific and useful political ideology tests is this one from IDRlabs. The test is specifically intended to avoid bias and prevent what their site describes as “spinning questions” that other political ideology sites do in order to sway you over to one end or the other. The questions here aren’t the type of cliche political questions you’ll find at other sites. They require a little more thought and consideration. They may cover two or three things you care deeply about, but which might conflict with one another. It’s also interesting that these aren’t strictly Agree or Disagree questions. Instead you move the slider along 5 positions on the bar to identify the degree to which you agree or disagree. The results at the end are also very easy to understand. It’s just a four-quadrant chart with Left and Right on the sides and Liberal and Communitarian on the bottom and top. The dot shows where you landed with your results. Under this chart you’ll also see where famous leaders like Obama, Reagan, and others are aligned.
4. Political Compass
This test on the aptly named Political Compass site is not quite as straightforward as other political ideology tests out there. It’ll ask you about your opinions about philosophy, entertainment, and other issues that are seemingly unrelated to politics. However, the test designers made the test in such a way to gauge your thought process and ultimately understand your political leanings through your answers. You’ll need to work through 6 pages of about 7 questions each. The results of this test look similar to that of IDRlabs, with slightly different labels. You will see two sets of arrows, and where they intersect is where you are in the political spectrum. You’ll see Left and Right on the sides and Libertarian and Authoritarian on the bottom and top. The vagueness of the questions and the number of questions makes this test one of the most accurate of all of them.
5. Vote Smart
The site Vote Smart offers a slightly more interactive option. You can either pick a picture of a candidate from one of the four most popular political parties, or choose an issue from a menu at the top. These will take you through a series of questions to see how closely your answers align with a particular political party’s platform. As you select each topic, answer the question, and say how important or not important the question is to you, the pictures of the candidates will grow or shrink. This represents how much alike or not alike you are with those candidates. When you’re done with all of the questions, you should have a pretty good idea which candidate’s ideology most matches your own! This might not drive who you ultimately vote for, but it should inform your decision a little better than just going to the polls blindly. Of course, if you’re a moderate, it may not help at all! From what I could tell as we tested the questions, the results appeared to be fairly accurate.
6. Advocates for Self-Government
This organization offers what they call “The World’s Smallest Political Quiz”. It’s supposed to take only about a minute, and your results will be compared to millions of other people who’ve taken the test. Just visit the Advocates site and select Take the Quiz at the top of the page. Then scroll down the page and provide one of three answers to each of the 11 questions. These cover personal issues, economic issues, and an optional bonus question. The bonus question is where you get to say where you think you fall politically. How much the test affects the results is unknown, so we’d suggest not answer it if you want to see how accurate the test really is. When you’re done answering the questions, just select Calculate My Results at the bottom. You’ll see an option to enter your email to get results. But you can bypass this by selecting Continue without saving. The results here on your political ideology range from Conservative to Progressive, and from Authoritarian to Libertarian. Since there are so few questions, the granularity of the results mean that what you discover about yourself at this site may swing a bit more to one extreme or the other than where you really are.
7. Polquiz
The final test to see what political ideology you are is Polquiz. Just visit the site and select Take the quiz on the main page. This is another quick and easy test because all of the questions are on one page. You just select each topic and it’ll drop down the question. Questions cover two major areas – social matters and economic matters. Note that the questions tend to be organized from the most government heavy to the most government-free, so try to answer the questions honestly rather than where your political ideology fits. Once you’re done, just select Submit Quiz and you’ll see the results in a Nolan Chart. Results work from left-wing to right-wing, and libertarian to totalitarian. The red bullseye will show you where in the political playing field you land.
Check Your Political Ideology
Many people assume that they fall in a specific political ideology because of a few very hot-button topics they believe strongly in. However, just a few answers on these tests on other topics could swing your results in a direction that may surprise you. So give a few of these political quizzes a try and see if you really are where you think you are in the political spectrum.
