Toward a Better Political Spectrum Chart
Leave it to Hofstede.
If you’re at all familiar with politics, then you’ve probably seen some variation on the above chart more than once. It’s plastered all over forums and blog posts, and writers love to array their personal heroes and villains across it in the name of analysis
I hate this chart. I’d go so far as to say that it’s useless.
We have two dimensions and there’s something wrong with each of them:
Left vs. Right. This one is a no-brainer — after all, these political dimensions are universal, right? The problem is that the terms “left” and “right” are undefined here. Each of these terms contains multitudes, and given that the whole point of this chart is to define political positions, the fact that an entire axis is vague and unbounded is an issue.
How do you define the political left and right? We tend to use policy positions for this, and in most situations that’s fine. But political positions are rooted in circumstances — they shift over time and place. If you use policy to define these terms, then they can’t be universal.
There are some essential philosophical positions that can be used to define the left and the right, but these are seldom used. In practice, these terms are defined however the partisan viewing the chart opts to: As Good vs. Evil, with one’s personal betes noire pushed a little farther over to the bad side.
Libertarian vs. Authoritarian. The problem here is that these terms are not equal. In Western societies, “authoritarian” is a snarl word, one that few (if any) people self-apply. The loaded nature of the terms means that this axis is even more of a Good-Evil split, and it is used primarily to denigrate one’s political opponents.
The other issue is that it’s often difficult to disentangle this axis from the other one. After all, if we opt to define the political left and right in terms of policy, it’s natural that one of those sides will generally be in support of measures seen as either increasing or decreasing personal liberty. Or is this axis about “personal liberty” at all, or some other narrow category of liberties? Again, the definition is vague.
I see this chart used more frequently as a blunt instrument than as anything educational, but a big part of this is that the definitions are left as exercises for the onlooker. This means that different people can read it differently, and thus it can’t be universal.
So how can we fix this? We need new terms that:
- Align with policy
- Have reasonably specific meanings
- Are value neutral
- Are high-level enough to make them universal.
I think I’ve worked out an alternative, and it all comes down to the work of Geert Hofstede.
Hofstede is best known for developing the dimensions of culture, one of the most common frameworks for analyzing and comparing national cultural values. This model defines culture by six numerical values (reduced to five if the indulgence-restraint is excluded, as it often is) which can then be compared straight across to each other.
While any of these values could be used to define politics, there are two that seem particularly germane: Power distance and individualism.
Power distance is defined as a measure of a society’s tolerance for inequality. However, this has less to do with the use of the term “equality” in modern American parlance, and more to do with how a society envisions its structure. On on the one hand, you have high power distance or hierarchical, meaning that the culture assumes that some sort of division of society is natural and/or desirable. Opposite this is the egalitarian culture, in which top-down power is seen as undesirable and control is meant to be more evenly spread.
Individualism refers to a culture’s concept of the importance of the self. Highly individualistic cultures are person-focused — they consider the individual’s decisions to be sacrosanct and put a high value on individual agency and desire. Opposite this is the group-focused culture, which puts the needs of the overall group — anything from the family to an ethnic group to an entire nation — above the desires of any individual. These are somewhat awkward terms, but I’m using them to avoid loaded words like “collectivist.”
The new chart would look something like this:
We can define each quadrant by its vision of an ideal society.
Egalitarian/person-focused: Liberalism. The ideal society is one where people are free to do as they see fit, without fear of repression.
Egalitarian/group-focused: Socialism. The ideal society is one where people see to each other’s well-being and no one wields undue power.
Hierarchical/person-focused: Libertarian. The ideal society is one where people are allowed and encouraged to use their natural talents, free of restraints.
Hierarchical/group-focused: Communitarian. The ideal society is one where people respect tradition and authority, acknowledging every person proper place.
The United States has a low-distance, high-individualism culture. I would expect to see a large share of people in the liberalism quadrant, though there’s bound to be a lot of variety here. In general, people on the political left will tend to fall into the egalitarian quadrants and people on the political right into the hierarchical quadrants — but there’s plenty of room for nuance.
There are issues with this model, of course. One thing I’ve noticed is that certain radical ideologies don’t map very neatly onto it. In particular, fascism — being a fairly incoherent policy — is an uneasy placement. Then again, if anything similar to this were ever widely accepted, real world surveys would stitch up problems like this.
