About a year ago Tim Lambert asked ScienceBloggers to check out a political quiz and collected the responses. 29 of us responded, and below the fold I’ve placed two graphs which display a smoothed out frequency distribution across the two axes generated by the survey. As noted by the author of the quiz the two axes were extrapolated from the empirical variation of responses (their the first two principle components of eigenvectors). They are Left/Right and pragmatism. A more positive value represent Right and and “atheist” or “utilitarian” tendencies on each axis respectively. Remember that the author is British so the respondents and their distribution of responses would have generated an ideological scale relevant to that nation. We’ve doubled the number of bloggers since that original survey, I’d be curious if there’s been any change (I doubt that).
Note: I simply used the average scalar value across the ranges that Tim used for each cell in his table. That is, if there were 10 individuals in the box which ranged from 2 to 4 I placed them all at “3.” I was just looking for general trends.
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