This summer, I began work on a website that would ask visitors some
questions and then tell them their ideology. I got caught up with the
technical difficulties and never completed the project. However, I believe
it could be useful, since most people I know use ideology as a heuristic.
That is, we don’t have the time to make a very precise and nuanced evaluation
of each candidate for each office. Instead, we start with the assumption
that we are liberals, conservatives, moderates, libertarians, feminists,
environmentalists, or proponents of some other ideology, and then we
use cues in the candidates’ speech and behavior to decide which politicians
come closest to our ideology. CIRCLE surveys show that those young people
who have no ideology do not vote, which suggests that this shortcut
is essential.
There are some websites that use a quiz format to generate an ideological
profile. I have found a Party
Matchmaking Quiz and a 2004
American Presidential Selector. The World’s
Smallest Political Quiz is fairly trivial, but the Ideology
Selector is more ambitious. The Political
Quiz Show uses an old question battery but is now online.
A few observations: First, the ideological spectrum tends to be presented
as unidimensional (left-right), whereas the real political map is more
complicated. (By the way, a complicated view of politics makes the programming
task more difficult, because ideology can’t be measured on a 1-100 scale).
Second, even though the quizzes aren’t very serious, they may be too
hard, because they ask for opinions about official policies which
people may never have heard of. I would prefer to see questions about
underlying values and social problems. Finally, there should be some
feedback. People should be shown what ideology they seem to endorse
and then presented with a general description of that ideology and its
rivals. If they agree with the general description, then their specific
views are consistent with their overall philosophy, and they can go
forth and vote. If, however, there is some tension, then they should
be invited to develop their thinking . (For those with a taste for political
philosophy, this would be a way of implementing John Rawls’ theory of
reflective equilibrium.)