The Pew Quiz on Political Typology

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I found it repetitive and unsatisfying. Thanks to Mark Perry for the pointer. I thought that the responses that were supposed to be conservative were left-wing stereotypes of conservative views. Not so much the other way. I thought that sometimes small wording nuances that they probably did not notice affected my answers. The difference between “most” and “every” was significant to me, but my guess is they chose those words more casually.

It called me a Business Conservative.

Business Conservatives generally are traditional small-government Republicans. Overwhelming percentages think that government is almost always wasteful and it does too much better left to businesses and individuals. Business Conservatives differ from Steadfast Conservatives in their positive attitudes toward business and in their strong support for Wall Street in particular. Most think that immigrants strengthen the country and take a positive view of U.S. global involvement. As a group, they are less socially conservative than Steadfast Conservatives.

I wonder if they have a libertarian category and I failed to make it there. Otherwise, what they call business conservative may be the closest thing you can get to libertarian within the confines of the survey.

I think that the three-axis model is better. Some people did not care for the quiz in The Three Languages of Politics, but I think it was actually a better quiz than what the Pew people came up with.

10 thoughts on “The Pew Quiz on Political Typology”

  1. I would self identify as fairly libertarian, and ended up getting: “Young Outsider” (along with 13% of the public.)

    “This relatively young, largely independent group holds a mix of conservative and liberal views. And while more lean toward the Republican Party than the Democratic Party, Young Outsiders generally express unfavorable opinions of both major parties. They are largely skeptical of activist government, as a substantial majority views government as wasteful and inefficient. Yet many diverge from the two conservative typology groups – Steadfast Conservatives and Business Conservatives – in their strong support for the environment and many liberal social policies.”

    It seems my summary is

    1) Government usually wasteful and regulations usually harmful
    2) More must be done about racial discrimination
    3) Pro-environmental regulation (which is a category that I really don’t like the lack of nuance because there are tradeoffs, but I do generally believe the environment falls under the “self-defense” part of government)
    4) Social programs don’t go far enough to help the poor (yet I also had dependency is a problem, I wanted to be more “our social programs are wasteful and ineffective at getting the outcomes they desire” but you can’t really capture that with their answer choices)
    5) Pro-immigration
    6) People can get ahead with hard work
    7) Corporations are not evil incarnate
    8) Ok with homosexuals
    9) Ok with athiests
    10) Don’t give up freedoms in name of fighting terrorism
    11) Mix of intervention abroad (mind our business more, but don’t totally divest ourselves – again the choices feeling too black and white)

    I don’t know if I’m closer to libertarian than “Business Conservative”, I don’t particularly like the structure of Wall St. as it seems to believe you are, but reading you regularly I struggle to believe the poll got you right on that anyway.

    Overall, I feel it’s less nuanced than the three-axis, as well as the old standby “World’s smallest political quiz”. Still, in regard to the gradient of “types” on the page, it probably labeled me as good as it could (slightly right of center)

  2. Ditto. Silly quizzes. As if I believe government should take sides. Hell, I’d let government itself be deemed illegal. I certainly don’t want it to “support Wall Street”.

  3. I think your first mistake was believing that this was an attempt to provide an insightful view into the reader’s political philosophy. As you’ve already noted, much of the point appeared to present the perceived “conservative” views in a very biased manner. I submit that the only other point of the “quiz” is ad revenue. Who can resist an online quiz?

    • Ditto. I only made it 1/3 of the way through before giving up in frustration and leaving this comment 🙂

  5. The more I’ve seen your 3-axis model applied to issues, the more useful I believe it to be. It neatly explains the thinking behind the vast majority of political views that I see out there. There are a group of people who don’t seem to fall into that model – these are the people that don’t seem to have thought much at all about society and how it should function. They seem to just focus on what they should do in their own lives – unfortunately they vote, often without much knowledge of the candidates and issues.

  6. “Immigrants today strengthen our country because of their hard work and talents” or “Immigrants today are a burden on our country because they take our jobs, housing and health care.”

    Lacks nuance. I picked the former over the latter, but it’s not much of a choice. Still came out ‘Steadfast Conservative’. Then again, the only categories were:

    Solid Liberals
    Faith and Family Left
    Next Generation Left
    Hard-Pressed Skeptics
    Young Outsiders
    Business Conservatives
    Steadfast Conservatives
    Bystanders

  7. Yes, this quiz and typology are grimly inaccurate with regard to libertarians. Here’s some explanation of theirs that jibes with what others have noted:

    You are missing my political group. Why is that?

    If your group is distinctive because of issues and values other than the ones we asked about, we probably couldn’t find you. Similarly, if your group is smaller than our average group (between 10%-15% of the general public), you wouldn’t have been discovered by our method.

    One group that many people have asked about are libertarians. We actually devoted a great deal of effort in trying to identify libertarians, and in an upcoming report we will discuss this effort and describe how libertarians fit into the typology. The shorter answer is that many members of the Business Conservative group would qualify as libertarian, if by libertarian we mean a preference for minimal government involvement in economic and personal affairs. But unlike many libertarians, most Business Conservatives favor the use of overwhelming force against terrorism, think the U.S. should be active in world affairs and believe that military strength is the best way to achieve peace. Similarly, a plurality of Business Conservatives opposes allowing gays and lesbians to marry legally. For these and other reasons, we decided not to describe this group as libertarian. Similarly, it’s likely that there are libertarians among the Young Outsider group, who are socially liberal and fiscally conservative. But many of them favor regulation to protect the environment, and thus don’t fit easily into the libertarian category.

  8. It is interesting in that it attempts to apportion the population into roughly equal sized groups so it does a better job in demarcating differences in position. Most are reasonably balanced in gender though conservatives are mostly male. Do I assume you failed to support the environment?

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