You have the “1D” political compass of left vs right, but those terms are so broad they can describe completely opposite viewpoints. Then there’s the “2D” political compass with authoritarian/libertarian and the classic left/right, but that is still quite broad and doesn’t fit every ideology and belief well. If someone were to create a fully fleshed out N-dimensional political compass that could accurately summarise generalise to a reasonable degree of accuracy* a person’s political perspective, how many axes are needed, and what would they be?
Of the top of my head, I can think of a few:
- authoritarian vs anti-authoritarian (on the extremes, you would have dictator bootlickers who support a one-rules-all style system and anarchists advocating for no authority at all)
- internationalism vs nationalism
- egalitarianism vs traditionalism (social equality vs hierarchal society)
- environmentalist vs anti-environmentalist (every policy must consider environmental impacts vs cLiMaTe ChAnGe Is A hOaX)
- progressive vs conservative (or pro-change vs anti-change)
- intellectualism vs anti-intellectualism (pro-science vs anti-science)
- free vs regulated economy (on the extremes, no government influence of the economy at all and a state-run economy)
Please don’t treat this as an argument over why your politics are better! Debating politics is the worst kind of internet argument one can consume themselves into…
Also, please note that this post is not intended to attack anyone with the above viewpoints. Just want to make that clear.
As a researcher doing data-stuff: there actually is a somewhat objective way to answer this! I don’t know the answer to the question itself though… and the method is quite boring
Usually how data scientists do this is to first collect a bunch of data… let’s say we have a 200~300 question comprehensive survey about ppl’s political beliefs. This survey would have a dimension of 200-300. We can include all of them but they would offer diminishing information (& is very confusing), so usually people trim it down to the most important dimensions only. We then apply dimensionality reduction/manifold method to reduce highly similar dimensions. I think in social sciences people call this factor analysis. Usually in my field people do PCA followed by UMAP, social scientists I think may do something differently but PCA is quite universal
Then researchers will be able to tell a few mathematically identified dimensions that contribute the most to the results. Say if the first dimension contributes 70% of the variation of people’s differences, and the second dimension another 25%… then we would have a 2-dimension model that can explain 95% of the differences and would be good enough. If the first dimension only 10%, second 8%… then a good model will need a lot more dimensions. This doesn’t tell what the dimensions are though, that’s up to the researchers to identify. If all of these work well, we’d have a simple, N-dimension model suggesting how people’s political beliefs are… and some of these might not map to what people would intuitively think of
Unless I’m mistaken, Big Five personality traits is developed this way for example… About politics, I found a 2013 research article that suggested two political dimensions: economic and social ideology
I guess this doesn’t quite answer the question… it just states how political dimensions (or any dimensions in data fields, really) came from, and the fact that there’s an old paper suggesting a two factor model of economic + social ideology. I don’t know how many dimensions are sufficient for politics, not to count for the fact that different countries/cultures treat this differently