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This is known as Horseshoe Theory, and it's a pretty lame model of political ideology.¹ In reality, most people can't be placed on a single dimension that accu

This is known as Horseshoe Theory, and it's a pretty lame model of political ideology.¹ In reality, most people can't be placed on a single dimension that accurately captures their political identity. Most political scientists prefer at least a biaxial spectrum, comprising of the left/right axis and another major axis like libertarian/authoritarian.² 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_spectrum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_spectrum

kbenson 7y ago
> it's a pretty lame model of political ideology. Well, I did say it's a poor approximation. The usefulness I alluded to is to understand that all these approximations are flawed in various ways, firstly because they are approximations, but more-so because they are all hopeless simplistic representations for what is being modeled. Biaxial is better than a single axis, but that doesn't make it better. The thing the horseshoe theory represents is something that the biaxial representation doesn't represent at all, a similarity of some aspects of though in the common extremes we see in reality. There's often a difference between diagrams that allow everything to be represented clearly and diagrams that help steer you into associations that are useful. Both have their place.