Playing with the Compass (Signifying Nothing: how does saying nothing at all become so loud?)

Wednesday, 5 November 2003

Playing with the Compass

I’m not a huge fan these days of the Nolan chart and similar quiz-based ideology measures; however, Tim Lambert has been compiling bloggers’ results on the Political Compass test. As he points out, it’s hardly a scientific sample of bloggers, so take it with a grain of salt.

An interesting outstanding question is whether the Compass is a particularly valid measure of ideology. Their FAQ seems to preclude any independent test of this proposition, as they claim copyright on the items—and I believe that such a copyight is valid, given the widespread use of copyrighted scale questions in psychometry.

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Welcome to Signifying Nothing, a weblog featuring serious (and frivolous) commentary from Chris Lawrence, an associate professor of political science at Middle Georgia State University in Macon, Georgia.
Chris was also formerly a contributor to Outside The Beltway.
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Signifying Nothing formerly featured the stylings of Brock Sides, a left-leaning philosopher turned network administrator currently residing in Memphis, Tennessee who now blogs at Battlepanda, and Robert Prather, a libertarian-leaning conservative economist and occasional contributor at OTB.

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