Political ideologies

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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?

• importance of studying doctrine ("doctrinality" or "doctrinaire") vs. observation and analysis (Rationalism) (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 (when applied to governance, this translates to authoritarianism (Authoritarianism) versus rule of the people)
• 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)
• value of intuition vs. reasoning/analysis
• value of human understanding, regardless of how it is arrived at (nihilism would be assigning low value to this)

Some issues which seem important but which may already be covered by the above:

• 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, but conservatives aren't willing to consider that marriage might be redesigned either) – can this be expressed as a combination of any of the others? It seems a bit overspecific to be a fundamental dimension...
• importance of observable facts versus pure reasoning (Continental rationalism)

Some sample uses of these axes:

• Mysticism: intuition important, observation unimportant ("Mysticism" can arguably be defined as the idea that intuition is always important and reasoning is always suspect)