10 Comments

The meme of the two-dimensional scatterplot, with social liberty along one axis and economic liberty along another axis, has been around for a long time, maybe twenty years or more. Lately I dismissed it because I believed it to be unscientific and because I believed that two dimensions is not enough to capture political variation, but now I know it was at the forefront of scientific progress! I expect that the one-dimensional model is often preferred by political scientists mainly because you can fit any hypothesis you like onto it. The two-dimensional model has restrictive adherence to reality.

Expand full comment

I find that there is confusion here between political idealogy and policy spectrum. Politics is always going to depend on the personalities who are involved and consequently this kind of idealogy is expressed in an over-sufficient personal a way and with an insufficient logical basis, so that it is not suitable for any intellectually honest analysis. What we want firstly is proper definitions of these various kinds of idealogies that are free from political motivations and bias, and then we would be in a better state to analyse them. I am not pretending that such definitions are easy to formulate, but otherwise we are in danger of each createing in his/her own (and differing) mind's eye, a variety of ideas of what it is all about.

Expand full comment

"Sometimes the results are really mysterious, such as the contrast between Czech Republic (strong positive cor.) vs. Poland (weak negative cor.) even though these are neighbors with mostly shared histories, and closely related cultures, languages and genetics!"

Czech Republic and Poland are quite different countries. Czech Republic is an urban and industrialized country since the 1880s, and is very irreligious for historical reasons. Poland's urbanization rate only achieved 50% in the 1960s, and religion (Catholicism) was the vessel of Polish culture and language over the centuries, very much in contrast to the Czech Republic where Catholicism is associated with the oppressor empire. Poland is more similar to Slovakia, Lithuania or Belarus, while Czech Republic is more similar to Germany or Hungary.

Expand full comment

I always wonder how much our analyses (not just here) get affected by the fact you can't make nice graphs once you get past two dimensions. But reality doesn't care if we can make nice graphs. From what I understand about psychology personalities are supposed to have five dimensions (extraversion, neuroticism, openness, conscientiousness, agreeableness). What's the model with the highest adjusted R-squared? Maybe we need three dimensions, or six.

I remember reading about this elsewhere, and the explanation I read is that Communist governments were socially conservative (and, of course, economically 'liberal'...uh, redistributionist), so if you were for 'progress' rather than tradition you tended to want the country to be more like the West, i.e. freer markets and pro-LGBT, abortion, etc. But I'd love to hear someone with real knowledge comment on this.

Also, while I doubt the increasingly-ideologically-captured academy's going to address this, you've got a bit of a shift in the definition of 'socially liberal' to include sanctions against people with the wrong views. Conservatives, as opposed to libertarians, have always supported censorship, but now increasingly 'liberals' do as well, just of different things. Is it 'socially liberal' to support throwing people in jail for posting racist memes online?

Expand full comment

I found the fact that less-informed voters have less coherent view than well-informed view pretty interesting. I'm curious as to why it is.

-Is it an artefact of interest in politics? As in does the more you read and follow politics compress your beliefs as you encounter certain patterns of belief that other interested people tend to hold?

-Is it an artifact of IQ? People better-informed about politics are (on average) just higher IQ. And smarter people tend to have more coherent beliefs about most things, again on average.

Is anyone aware of research on this?

Expand full comment

Attitude to copyright doesn't seem to fit into traditional 2 axes. Could it be a 3rd axis?

Expand full comment

You had me at those 'smug' descriptions of conservatives. That discourse drives me wild, along with notions that authoritarianism is a conservative thing. That uni-dimensional model needs euthenising. (Left-intuitive refugee from the postmodern Leftish here, saying thanks).

Expand full comment