Steve Bainbridge and Brian Leiter have enjoyed the Political Compass survey and index of political beliefs. I tried it too, but am not as enthusiastic as Professor Leiter. My rating is

Economic Left/Right: 5.50
Libertarian/Authoritarian: 4.56

which puts me between Berlusconi, Bush, and Sharon. That's the right company generally, but then I noticed that Tony Blair is almost identical to Berlusconi in this index, and except perhaps for Sharon (I don't know his politics very well) there are no strong conservatives, only moderate ones, illustrated. I then discovered, from the site's diagram of British political parties, that the scale puts New Labor and the Conservatives at almost identical points-- and close to me! That says something sad about the British Conservative Party, maybe, but I'm shocked to find myself in such company. A scale that can't distinguish New Labor and Eric Rasmusen isn't very useful.

But I suppose usefulness depends on the application. An index might be quite good for distinguishing the various breeds of leftie while being useless for distinguishing between conservatives. It is like thermometers: if you have one optimized for 0 to 100 degrees, it will not be very useful for your baking needs.

A worse problem is that the index is not objective. James Lindgren, of Northwestern Law, is at work on what will be a very important book that will revolutionize the subject. His approach is the following. Rather than try to define "conservative" himself, he will let the data determine it. The General Social Survey has long asked people how they would rate themselves in conservatism, and then asks them many other questions too. Lindgren's method is to see what questions correlate best with self- described conservatism in the American population. Thus, what will come out are the beliefs that best predict whether someone would be considered a conservative by the average belief of Americans, not by what Lindgren himself thinks is a conservative. If whether you like dogs better than cats is the best correlate with self-described conservatism, so be it, by this method. And this method allows for an objective measure of how good the resulting index is: we can find, for example, the ten survey questions that yield the highest R-Squared (roughly, correlation) with conservatism, and then compare that with the R-Squared of the best five questions to see whether using extra questions in the index really helps much (it always will help a little, by mathematical tautology).

At the 2002 Urbana meeting of the Midwest Law and Economics Association meeting, Lindgren tried out a pilot version of his survey on the fifteen or so law-and-economics professors present. The result was educational. If I remember rightly, only one person was in the 0-40th percentile of the general population in liberalism. (When Lindgren announced this, all heads turned towards me--and I admit it!). There were a few people around the 50th percentile. The median was somewhere like the 75th percentile, with lots at 90+, and Lindgren said that the group had roughly the same profile as East Coast people with advanced degrees. Yet this was a group of scholars in law and economics, a field considered in law schools to be roughly equivalent with Patrick Buchanan on the political spectrum (many law and econ professors even vote Republican sometimes!). It was news to the group that in the spectrum of Americans generally they are on the far left.

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