The Irish political compass

Credit to the Irish National Election Study, 2002 for opinion data, and Political Survey 2005 for the original concept.

This application uses Javascript. The questions, and the panel of answers on which the results are based, come from real survey data. If you'd like more information or explanation, send word my way.

1. It would be better if more people with strong religious beliefs held public office.
2. I would be willing to accept a cut in my standard of living in order to protect the environment.
3. Ordinary working people get their fair share of the nation's wealth.
4. Income tax should be increased for people on higher than average incomes.
5. There is one law for the rich and one for the poor.
6. There is nothing wrong with some people being a lot richer than others.
7. Many of the claims about environmental threats are exaggerated.
8. There should be very strict limits on the number of immigrants coming to live in Ireland.
9. The British Government should continue to have a lot of say in the way Northern Ireland is run.
10. The long term policy for Northern Ireland should be to reunify with the rest of Ireland.
11. The British government should declare its intention to withdraw from Northern Ireland at a fixed date in the future.
12. People should not have to put up with Travellers' halting sites in their neighbourhood.
13. Asylum seekers should have the same rights to social services as Irish people.
14. My first priority is to provide for myself and my family, even if this means doing things that harm the environment.
15. I would be willing to pay much higher taxes in order to protect the environment.
16. Business and industry should be free from regulation by the State.
17. Ireland's membership of the European Union is a good thing.
18. Private enterprises are better than public or semi-state companies in providing the services people need.
19. Most of business and industry should be privately owned, not owned by the State.
20. Homosexuality is always justified.
21. European unification should be pushed further; it has not already gone too far.
22. God exists.
23. We should encourage economic growth, even if this damages the environment.
24. Ireland should do all it can to protect its independence from the European Union.
25. Sometimes politics and government seem so complicated that a person like me cannot really understand what is going on.
26. The ordinary person has no influence on politics.
27. I think I am better informed about politics and government than most people.
28. In today's world, an Irish government can't really influence what happens in this country.
29. It doesn't really matter which political party is in power, in the end things go on much the same.

Inward-Outward axis:
Right-Left axis:
Distance from centre:
Percent closer to centre than you:

The primary axis, along which most of the variance happens, is difficult to explain. Think of it as a measure of whether your views are inward-looking, nihilist, and working-class, or outward-looking, bien-pensant, and middle-class. A high positive value signals very middle-class, bien-pensant beliefs, and negative values mean the contrary. Beliefs about out-group treatment, political empowerment and relations with Europe and the UK are most important in determining values along this axis; economics and personal morality are far less important.

The second number is a traditional left-right axis dominated by economic issues like income distribution and the environment. Here, positive values mean broadly left-wing opinions. Here, most of a respondent's value is determined by their opinions about the economy, the distribution of income and wealth, and the environment. Politics and out-group treatment are less important.

The first axis is almost twice as important as the second axis. This makes sense if we think about the complaints from leftists that Ireland lacks a left-right political divide, self-serving though they may be. The easiest way to divide Irish people by their opinions seems to be on less tangible social issues, not on economics. My own analysis of the INES data indicates that Labour voters are different from FF or FG voters not so much because they are left-wing (second axis), but because they are more "outward-looking" or "middle-class" (first axis).

The national centre is slightly inward-looking and left-wing; a person who is neutral on all issues is closer to the centre than 97.5 percent of respondents.

This quiz has lots of advantages over the political compass we all know and love. Firstly, the axes are based on a nice numerical technique called principal components analysis. Based on how real people answered a set of questions, we can use college freshman-level maths to extract the important axes along which they disagree. I don't assign scores to questions, the program does that, so you don't have to buy into my definition of "libertarian" or any of the usual nonsense. Secondly, as long as the questions are balanced, the axes will be genuinely independent of each other and they will show the most important political divides. So each quadrant has about the same number of people in it. Thirdly, this lets us calculate the most honest Euclidean distance available. We can calculate the most reasonable figure for a person's "political distance" from the mean respondent, or from another person.

The main weakness? This image is only a two-dimensional summary of highly multi-dimensional data. The two most important axes, important though they may be, account for only 17 percent of the total variance of people's views in the survey. You can be close to someone on this chart without agreeing all that much with every specific view they may have. Whether it be due to the choice of questions, or some quirk in the Irish psyche, it's hard to summarise opinions about politics, society and the economy along a small number of meaningful measures.