Political Map

Have you ever felt like ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ just weren’t adequate terms to sum up your political view? The Nolan chart fills in what’s missing. From their website:

The Nolan chart was originally created by libertarian political scientist David Nolan, who was also the lead founder of the Libertarian Party. He correctly realized that limiting analysis of political opinions to merely their liberality or conservativeness does not adequately account for all political viewpoints. By reorienting personal freedom issues along the “Y” axis and economic issues along the “X” axis, he created a two dimensional chart that is much more accurate and meaningful when analyzing a particular person’s political viewpoint. This makes the Nolan chart’s two-dimensional approach a much more accurate representation of the political spectrum than the typical one-dimensional left-to-right line most political analysts refer to.

Nolan Chart from Advocates for Self Government (ASG) The quiz separates personal issues from economic issues, allowing greater depth and understanding of someone’s position, which serves to show why most politicians and pundits ignore it, despite its obvious superiority and its age: Most politicians would rather be judged on their perceived strengths than on their actions or their true positions, and most pundits do what it takes to get interviews, which usually includes at least implicit agreement to ’softball’ the questioning.