Political ideologies

This page is a seed article. You can help Issuepedia water it: make a request to expand a given page and/or donate to help give us more writing-hours!

The quantifying of all political ideologies as falling somewhere in a "left-right" spectrum is generally misleading and appears to arise largely from a short-lived circumstance of seating in the French National Assembly in the 18th century^[1]. Other systems have been proposed, generally using two or more dimensions.

Political Spectra

• Nolan chart: [personal freedom] x [economic freedom]
• Pournelle chart: [belief in reason] x [belief in a State]

References

1. The Pournelle Political Axes (1986)

Brainstorming

What other dimensions might be significant in measuring political ideology?

• willingness to reopen discussion of existing solutions (as opposed to just solving new problems), in different arenas (e.g. social, as in marriage laws; infrastructure, as in power generation - liberals don't want to reconsider nuclear as an option, for example)
• importance of studying doctrine ("doctrinality" or "doctrinaire") vs. use of reasoning (Pournelle box only charts reason vs. irrationality - is "belief in an incorruptible doctrine" a form of irrationality? If so, is it the only form?)
• preference for superior-inferior (usually hierarchical) power relationships, as opposed to peer-peer
• belief that the human condition can be improved (however slowly) vs. the idea of a golden past to which we can only aspire to one day return (usually by following the rules laid out in some ancient doctrine; this tends to go together with doctrinality)