Airborne_Again wrote:
I’m more surprised that there is also a clear tendency towards the left. Of course it depends on how you calibrate the centre.
They explain it in item 22 of their FAQ:
Politics have moved, but you’re still using the old economic parameters.
Some critics have argued that, because the universal political centre has moved to the right, our axes should correspondingly move to the right. This, however, would not indicate how far one way or the other society has shifted. It could not convey paradoxes such as the fact that, in the UK, Tony Blair’s New Labour occupied an economic position to the right of pre-Thatcher Conservatives. Where was the centre, for example, in Apartheid South Africa? In Third Reich society, such a skewed analysis might show a Nazi opposed to the death chambers as representing liberal opinion.
Narrowing the standard political goalposts to accommodate merely the range of mainstream opinion within any given society at a given time is not only historically uninstructive; it is unscientific.
The FAQ as a whole is a worthwhile read: https://www.politicalcompass.org/faq
It is very notable that every one of us is in the “Libertarian” half of the coordinate system, and everyone except Silvaire so far landed in the “left-libertarian” quadrant. While one can certainly question the methodology and accuracy of the political compass, I still think this demonstrates that the ideological differences that we do experience in this forum are mainly due to nuances of what is broadly the same, Western worldview: That we view a free, democratic and capitalist society as the best possible society to live in (at least the best of all realistic options). All remaining political differences on EuroGA work out to preferences in details on how exactly to structure our free and democratic, capitalist societies.
Yes, although I think we still need more posts from aircraft owners 
It is tempting to split this off into a dedicated thread, but on balance I think not [yet] because it is political.
I know most people avoid this thread totally, on principle, and looking back into the past one can see why. A lot of the stuff posted in the past would have been deleted elsewhere.
I tend to agree with @Silvaire that the questions were somewhat leading. So much so that I ended up, in an attempt to answer fairly, churning the question over in my head to understand what it was really getting at before answering. Straight and ‘literal’ answers would have given me silly results.
I feel it’s come out with a left bias for me. I would actually have placed myself a similar distance (or perhaps even a little more) to the right of the centre line.
If you read the FAQ, that’s how the questions (or propositions) are designed, and why there isn’t a “don’t know” or other “blow it off” type of answer.
I merely tried to answer the questions as accurately as possible; it’s anonymous and the data isn’t collected, so deliberately I shelved any ideas of “what will other people think about the way I answered this question”, because there aren’t other people watching.
To me, the end result was interesting, but no surprise.
MedEwok wrote:
It is very notable that every one of us is in the “Libertarian” half of the coordinate system
No, my score was in the authorian right, yet very close to the line.
Not surprising to me but it explains why I quite often my opinions differ with other posters here.
My colleagues in the UK tend to think I am off to the right wing during lunch conversations; instead I realize now it is the libertarian axis…
All good fun, but I think it is unsurprising that flying selects a similar sub-set of people.
What would be interesting is to see the charts of people who work as airspace regulators! I mean, what are all of those flying rules… most of them are just made up constructs! Given that the sky is practically empty, you should more or less be able to do as you please (so long as it doesn’t negatively impact on others…).
Graham wrote:
I tend to agree with @Silvaire that the questions were somewhat leading.
Every question is leading. And some of them are actually quite tricky to answer because one needs to think a lot about what is really asked for.
(e.g. already starting with the first one “If economic globalisation is inevitable,…”.) So it is obviously made for a very educated audience.
But it’s still fun – not more but also not less…
I find it interesting that the results list so many here as left of center, I think most with any experience of US pilots and airport culture would understand that essentially nobody in that world is a self professed left winger, certainly single digit percentage, one in a hundred wouldn’t surprise me. Therefore either the GA culture is dramatically different in Europe or the website defines left wing differently. I suspect a combination of both but am regardless happier to be in the same quadrant as Nobel prize winners for economics than with political fools and authoritarian dictators
I took the ‘test’ again, this time quickly and without a lot of thought, and the result was not much different.
