The Christian Science Monitor has this quiz you can take to see where you land on the political spectrum; an OK test, but the results are a bit disappointing–you are only told if your answers rate, on average, as isolationist, liberal, realist, or neoconservative. No specifics, no spectrums. It wasn’t too surprising, or very interesting, when the quiz told me I was a liberal. Shock!

A much better quiz is the Political Compass, a six-page test with a great number of multiple-choice questions (on the agree-disagree scale). After you take the test, you are not pigeonholed into one of four categories, but you are placed specifically on a 2-dimensional chart, where the ends of the two axes represent liberal, conservative, authoritarian and libertarian extremes. You can then compare your position (see chart, upper right) to the positions of famous political figures (shown on a separate graph, I did some Photoshopping). Not too surprising to see George. W. Bush up there with Thatcher and Sharon, nor that he is closer to Hitler than Gandhi. More surprising is seeing Pope John Paul II in the neighborhood of Stalin, Hussein and Arafat. I guess that makes sense from an ideological point of view, but you don’t think of it that way, usually. And that’s me, right next to the Dalai Lama.

The test is not perfect, as there are some questions which could be interpreted differently by different people, and a few with no choices that exactly represent your views. Still most people report that they get placed pretty accurately, and it is fun to see where you come out. Go ahead, give it a try. If you do, come back here and share the results.