#readwise # The Political Compass - Wikipedia  ## Metadata - Author: [[en.wikipedia.org]] - Full Title: The Political Compass - Wikipedia - URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Political_Compass - See also: [[Political Spectrum - Wikipedia]] ## Highlights **The Political Compass is a website which uses responses to a set of 62 propositions to rate political ideology in a political spectrum with two axes: economic (left–right) and social (authoritarian–libertarian).** --- The underlying theory of the political model used by "The Political Compass" is that **political ideology may be better measured along two separate, independent axes**. **The economic (left–right) axis measures one's opinion of how the economy should be run**: "left" is defined as the desire for the economy to be run by a cooperative collective agency, which can mean the state but also a network of communes, while "right" is defined as the desire for the economy to be left to the devices of competing individuals and organizations. --- **The other axis (authoritarian–libertarian) measures one's political opinions in a social sense, regarding the amount of personal freedom that one would allow.** Libertarianism is defined as the belief that personal freedom should be maximised, while authoritarianism is defined as the belief that authority should be obeyed. ---