As the 112th US Congress assembles, and in the midst of a UK coalition government about to increase consumption tax by 2.5% to 20% at the beginning of the "Age of Austerity" (clue: unlikely to be either sexy or fun), it's sometimes fun to look at the ideological distribution.
The best place I've found to study this is the good people at PoliticalCompass.org; all very interesting, especially when they look at the historic leaders. Is Mugabe more left wing than Ghandi? No, but he's the antithesis of Ghandi's anti-authoritarianism (and quite a lot of other things, too...)
So here's my chart from our Political Compass. No great surprise on this from my perspective.
Interestingly, here's their take on the UK political parties in 2010 - never saw myself as a Green. Hmm! More interestingly, the plethora of ostensibly "left wing" parties are to varying degrees, increasingly authoritarian - Respect, SSP and SF - but less than Labour and the conservative parties (Tories and UKIP). Interesting too that the nasty racists of the BNP are actually comparatively centrist in economic terms (though presumably only if you're "White British").
And on the same scores, here's the US 2008 positions:
Let me know how you get on - http://www.politicalcompass.org/test
Toby
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