Interesting test. I was 60% traditionalist, 75% marketeer, while 5% libertarian, 20% nativist, and 20% social conservative.
So I guess by today's standards not very right wing?
Truth is I love British heritage and believe we have something special, but I have a lot of contempt for the British population in general as being miserable, petty and spiteful people. If I were not English I would probably be a 'sovereign individual' type of person and thus much more libertarian.
I would be curious to see some graphs giving distributions of results. For example, where does my 95% libertarian score put me among test-takers? I am guessing it would be in the 5% tail but not in the 1%, but would love to know. Similarly curious about my 0% scores on both nativism and social conservatism, I suspect I am a strong outlier there!
Looking at the latest data 95% libertarian is the 99th percentile. The lower quartiles for Nativist and Social Conservative at 0%, so you're with at least 25% of the sample. If I only include people who said they would vote for a right wing party, there are only 0.65% of people with a Libertarian score of 95% or greater., with 6% of the right-wing voting sample getting 0% on Nativist and 17% getting 0% on Social Conservative...so far.
Thanks, very interesting! Did you run anything on correlations? e.g. if nativism and social conservatism are uncorrelated we would probably expect about 1% of the sample to get 0% on both. (I suspect they are weakly positively correlated, which would predict a somewhat higher percentage of people getting 0 on both.)
On the current full sample the correlations between the percentage scores run from .46 (Social Conservative / Libertarian) to .76 (Traditionalist / Nativist). With the right wing filter applied these drop to .04 (Social Conservative / Free Marketeer, not significant) and .10; (Social Conservative / Libertarian, p < .05) to .55 (Libertarian / Free Marketeer) with Traditionalist / Nativist dropping to second highest at .53. All correlations significant at p < .001 except where noted. The one you specifically asked about, Nativist / Social Conservative is .69 in the full sample and .41 in the right wing sample.
Note that Iain's percentage conversion score gives anyone generally opposed to one of the archetypes, or unsure a score of 0%.
I’d like to understand more about how the questions were developed. Were they deliberately ambiguous? For example:- Should prostitution be legalised? I don’t think prostitutes should be criminalised, but I don’t approve of prostitution- it’s exploitative. Similarly, “who would you vote” for ignores tactical voting
I'll leave Iain to comment on how the questions were originally created, but I gave a fair amount of feedback to remove double-barrelled questions where people might have different opinions (e.g. trans people in bathrooms vs trans people in sport). I don't think "Should prostitution be legalised?" is ambiguous, but it is asking you about that aspect and not about your opinions of prostitution more generally. Personally, I agreed to this one as disagreed to the one about buying and selling organs because I care much more about people who might not be able to afford organs they want than prostitutes.
Thank you both Rachael and Wakefield Morys-Carter for thinking about my question and sharing your opinions in reply.
I can acknowledge that you, unlike me, have correctly understood the questions. But that still means people like me “confound” or distort the analysis.
And WMC’s response to prostitution and organs is a reminder of the inconsistencies that tweaks in “trolley problem” scenarios can cause me.
If items are read differently by significant numbers of people then I will be able to identify them as having poor reliability. Across the full sample, "Some soft drugs, such as cannabis and ecstasy, should be legalised." is negatively correlated with the other Libertarian items (-.20) and "The state has an important role in preventing adults from viewing pornography and obscenity." seems to be a poor measure of Social Conservatism (item-rest correlation .17). On the other hand, if I just look at the four right wing political affiliations, the soft drugs question has a small positive correlation with the rest of it's scale (.20) and the correlation for the obscenity item increased to .31. Meanwhile, the lowest inter-item reliability of the traditionalist items decreased from a Cronbach's Alpha of .80 to .65 (less than the normal rule of thumb of .70 required for a reliable scale).
To add to WMC's reply, the questions were developed via a combination of my knowledge of right-wing politics and political philosophies, and his expertise in writing good questions. We then beta tested them on a dozen people with different self-identified positions in the right-wing perspective (e.g. a Cameroon, a Christian social conservative, a Reform supporter), and made some small adjustments as a result.
There's always a trade-off in these sorts of quizzes between specificity, breadth of coverage and length. Based on other successful quizzes, I'd be unwilling to go much beyond 50 questions or I think completion would fall off; that unfortunately means all the nuanced views someone might have on, say, drugs gets flattened into a single question. The reality is different people will answer in slightly different ways, or interpret the meaning between 'agree' and 'strongly agree' differently - but at an individual level, it's a fun quiz rather than something with a pass/fail, and in aggregate, these will ideally even out.
On your specific questions, the voting intention question mirrors the way this is asked in various BPC registered polling companies who carry out voter intention polling, and while some questions are more ambiguous (what is 'most' regulation, for example?) I don't agree that the prostitution is one of those - it's very explicit about what it is asking.
I think the negative correlation of the drugs question with other libertarian questions is not surprising. Many left wing people support legalisation of soft drugs but are not libertarian. I think this quiz is very good in identifying different groups within the right wing sample but it is not surprising this drops off among the whole sample. I agree that completion would drop off if the quiz was longer -- it was close to the upper limit of such quizzes I am willing to complete.
The median time spent was 258 seconds on the questions, with an interquartile range of 212 seconds to 329 seconds, so that feels about right. Students often ask me how many questions they should have in their questionnaires, and I tell them that the time it takes to answer the questions is much more important. Around five minutes feels about right for something like this -- there was a lot of nuance and a payoff (the personalised graph which you don't get when doing a student's psychology project). The completion rate was pretty good too, at 74% though I see that it has now dropped off to 70% (nearly 2700 submissions in 28 hours! My students struggle to get 100)
I don't know either of you that well but from what I do know I'm not surprised that you came out as more right-wing overall than him, but with both having some areas you identified with much more strongly than others.
I had a lot of issues with the framing of the questions so I don't know how accurate my results were. I got nothing except 9% libertarian - but when the quiz was being made, how did you distinguish between anarchist and libertarian beliefs?
Apologies to anyone who had issues trying the quiz yesterday (Friday 26th) and was unable to complete it. The server was under a lot of load from bots (which have been plaguing the Internet with increasingly disruptive behaviour over the past few months), and our server admin was travelling and therefore not in a position to fend them off.
To read more about bad bots, there is a downloadable report here:
I was wondering where "law and order" fitted into this typology, and I went back and read the original post and saw you'd lumped it in with "Traditionalist". I'm not sure I'd agree with that.
I'm thinking of a strand of conservatism that believes things like:
* Sentencing is generally too lenient, sometimes outrageously so
* Life sentences should mean life, and N years should mean N years, not N/2 or N/3
* The main purpose of prison is to remove from society the small percentage who commit most of the crime
* The death penalty is appropriate in some cases
* Poverty is not a major driver of crime (especially crimes other than theft and fraud)
* Prison is too cushy, especially if it includes leisure/enrichment activities that people normally have to pay to do
* The police should perform searches and arrests based on who is committing crimes rather than to meet demographic quotas, and sentencing should be based on the severity of the crime and not on demographic quotas
* Society is too tolerant of petty crimes like vandalism
* Corporal punishment may be appropriate for some crimes, and may actually be rehabilitative because it's over and done rather than derailing someone's life by sending them to prison with other criminals
* Vandals should be made to either pay to repair the damage or physically fix it themselves
* People who tackle shoplifters are doing a public service and should be celebrated, not vilified or fired
And while there's clearly some correlation between this and your "Traditionalist" (just as there is between many other pairs of conservative archetypes), I think they're distinct enough that I'd want to spin it out into its own archetype.
For example, many futuristic-minded techbro-types, who are Anywheres rather than Somewheres, and who might want to live in (or even design) radically new societies that strongly break from tradition (charter cities, settlements on Mars, crypto-based economies, etc), are very pro- law and order. And someone like Rupert Lowe would probably agree with all of the above list, and he's not "a defender of the country’s institutions and structures", and is more of a "radical" than a believer in "incremental change".
And I think the law-and-order conservative can be a natural ally of the Libertarian and the Free Marketeer, as they all support "negative rights" to be left alone to peacefully enjoy one's property without it being either over-taxed, stolen, or vandalised, and to go anywhere and interact commercially or socially with anyone without needless risk to one's physical safety.
And what's left of the Traditionalist archetype (history, heritage, stability of institutions) could probably be lumped in with the Social Conservative, if you want to keep only five archetypes.
Interesting! I wonder if some of this is connected to the 'civil war in the Traditionalist' I refer to in the original piece?
I do agree that this is a distinct subtype within the Traditionalist (just as, in theory, Free Market and Low Tax can be separated out in the first). I think there is a clear philosophy which goes back to people like Burke and Scruton why these would go together, but you're right that in today's world there are people who are radicals who would support law and order but not some of the other things.
One thing we will be able to do with the results is see to what extent the 'authority' questions in the Traditionalist do indeed form a distinct cluster (and whether they correlate more with any of the other archetypes).
A survey good for sociology as these are "ideological" categories but less good for politics because voting is driven usually by the main economic interest of the voter rather than their cultural preferences.
Still there are voters who vote against their main economic interest because of deeply held cultural preferences (most obviously some "nativist" property owners are anti-immigration even if they realize that without massive immigration their housing income would halve and their living standards would collapse).
The people who vote on cultural preferences are precious to politicians because it usually costs public money to satisfy economic interests but usually satisfying a cultural preference does not require public money (for example allowing or forbidding same-sex marriage).
«Large numbers of voters do, and always have, voted against their economic interests.»
Indeed but they tend to be "tribal" that is they vote "their" party every time. It is usually "transactional" voter blocks following their economic interests who change their vote to punish governments that have failed to boost those economic interests.
For example the large switch of property-owning voters from the tory-globalist Conservatives to the tory-nationalist Reform is usually attributed to a switch of those voters from globalism ("leftism" in the sense of whiggism) to nationalism ("rightism" in sense of trad-conservativism) but I reckon that it is actually a protest vote due to property prices being on average flat since 2022, depriving property-owning voters of the large yearly amounts (redistributed entirely from the lower classes) they entitled themselves to.
«Large numbers of voters do, and always have, voted against their economic interests.»
«Indeed but they tend to be "tribal" that is they vote "their" party every time. It is usually "transactional" voter blocks following their economic interests who change their vote»
I have remembered a delightful example from Tony Blair himself in 1996:
“I was canvassing in the Midlands on an ordinary suburban estate. I met a man polishing his Ford Sierra, self-employed electrician, Dad always voted Labour. He used to vote Labour, he said, but he bought his own home, he had set up his own business, he was doing quite nicely, so he said I’ve become a Tory.”
Posting my results here so I can refer to them in the future:
Free Marketeer 80%
Libertarian 63%
Traditionalist 50%
Social Conservative 15%
Nativist 0%
I'm a member of the Libertarian Party so this checks out. I'm surprised at Nativist 0% because I would describe myself as a (British) nationalist, but perhaps a nationalist and a nativist are very different things?
EDIT: I see I graded myself at the following scores (out of 10) in response to your original article:
Nativist: 9
Libertarian: 8
Free Marketer: 7
Social Conservative: 5
Traditionalist: 5
Either I'm a lot less Nativist than I think I am or there's something wrong with the questions.
Interesting! Most other people haven't found the nativist archetype coding incorrectly - maybe what you were thinking of as nativist came into traditionalist? Pride in history, patriotism, etc?
Interesting test. I was 60% traditionalist, 75% marketeer, while 5% libertarian, 20% nativist, and 20% social conservative.
So I guess by today's standards not very right wing?
Truth is I love British heritage and believe we have something special, but I have a lot of contempt for the British population in general as being miserable, petty and spiteful people. If I were not English I would probably be a 'sovereign individual' type of person and thus much more libertarian.
I would be curious to see some graphs giving distributions of results. For example, where does my 95% libertarian score put me among test-takers? I am guessing it would be in the 5% tail but not in the 1%, but would love to know. Similarly curious about my 0% scores on both nativism and social conservatism, I suspect I am a strong outlier there!
Looking at the latest data 95% libertarian is the 99th percentile. The lower quartiles for Nativist and Social Conservative at 0%, so you're with at least 25% of the sample. If I only include people who said they would vote for a right wing party, there are only 0.65% of people with a Libertarian score of 95% or greater., with 6% of the right-wing voting sample getting 0% on Nativist and 17% getting 0% on Social Conservative...so far.
Thanks, very interesting! Did you run anything on correlations? e.g. if nativism and social conservatism are uncorrelated we would probably expect about 1% of the sample to get 0% on both. (I suspect they are weakly positively correlated, which would predict a somewhat higher percentage of people getting 0 on both.)
On the current full sample the correlations between the percentage scores run from .46 (Social Conservative / Libertarian) to .76 (Traditionalist / Nativist). With the right wing filter applied these drop to .04 (Social Conservative / Free Marketeer, not significant) and .10; (Social Conservative / Libertarian, p < .05) to .55 (Libertarian / Free Marketeer) with Traditionalist / Nativist dropping to second highest at .53. All correlations significant at p < .001 except where noted. The one you specifically asked about, Nativist / Social Conservative is .69 in the full sample and .41 in the right wing sample.
Note that Iain's percentage conversion score gives anyone generally opposed to one of the archetypes, or unsure a score of 0%.
Thank you! That's super interesting.
I’d like to understand more about how the questions were developed. Were they deliberately ambiguous? For example:- Should prostitution be legalised? I don’t think prostitutes should be criminalised, but I don’t approve of prostitution- it’s exploitative. Similarly, “who would you vote” for ignores tactical voting
I think the crux of questions like that is "do you think things you disapprove of should be illegal, or not?"
Although the individual questions might be confounded by some respondents who don't disapprove of the object-level thing in the first place.
I'll leave Iain to comment on how the questions were originally created, but I gave a fair amount of feedback to remove double-barrelled questions where people might have different opinions (e.g. trans people in bathrooms vs trans people in sport). I don't think "Should prostitution be legalised?" is ambiguous, but it is asking you about that aspect and not about your opinions of prostitution more generally. Personally, I agreed to this one as disagreed to the one about buying and selling organs because I care much more about people who might not be able to afford organs they want than prostitutes.
Thank you both Rachael and Wakefield Morys-Carter for thinking about my question and sharing your opinions in reply.
I can acknowledge that you, unlike me, have correctly understood the questions. But that still means people like me “confound” or distort the analysis.
And WMC’s response to prostitution and organs is a reminder of the inconsistencies that tweaks in “trolley problem” scenarios can cause me.
If items are read differently by significant numbers of people then I will be able to identify them as having poor reliability. Across the full sample, "Some soft drugs, such as cannabis and ecstasy, should be legalised." is negatively correlated with the other Libertarian items (-.20) and "The state has an important role in preventing adults from viewing pornography and obscenity." seems to be a poor measure of Social Conservatism (item-rest correlation .17). On the other hand, if I just look at the four right wing political affiliations, the soft drugs question has a small positive correlation with the rest of it's scale (.20) and the correlation for the obscenity item increased to .31. Meanwhile, the lowest inter-item reliability of the traditionalist items decreased from a Cronbach's Alpha of .80 to .65 (less than the normal rule of thumb of .70 required for a reliable scale).
To add to WMC's reply, the questions were developed via a combination of my knowledge of right-wing politics and political philosophies, and his expertise in writing good questions. We then beta tested them on a dozen people with different self-identified positions in the right-wing perspective (e.g. a Cameroon, a Christian social conservative, a Reform supporter), and made some small adjustments as a result.
There's always a trade-off in these sorts of quizzes between specificity, breadth of coverage and length. Based on other successful quizzes, I'd be unwilling to go much beyond 50 questions or I think completion would fall off; that unfortunately means all the nuanced views someone might have on, say, drugs gets flattened into a single question. The reality is different people will answer in slightly different ways, or interpret the meaning between 'agree' and 'strongly agree' differently - but at an individual level, it's a fun quiz rather than something with a pass/fail, and in aggregate, these will ideally even out.
On your specific questions, the voting intention question mirrors the way this is asked in various BPC registered polling companies who carry out voter intention polling, and while some questions are more ambiguous (what is 'most' regulation, for example?) I don't agree that the prostitution is one of those - it's very explicit about what it is asking.
I think the negative correlation of the drugs question with other libertarian questions is not surprising. Many left wing people support legalisation of soft drugs but are not libertarian. I think this quiz is very good in identifying different groups within the right wing sample but it is not surprising this drops off among the whole sample. I agree that completion would drop off if the quiz was longer -- it was close to the upper limit of such quizzes I am willing to complete.
The median time spent was 258 seconds on the questions, with an interquartile range of 212 seconds to 329 seconds, so that feels about right. Students often ask me how many questions they should have in their questionnaires, and I tell them that the time it takes to answer the questions is much more important. Around five minutes feels about right for something like this -- there was a lot of nuance and a payoff (the personalised graph which you don't get when doing a student's psychology project). The completion rate was pretty good too, at 74% though I see that it has now dropped off to 70% (nearly 2700 submissions in 28 hours! My students struggle to get 100)
Thank you both for providing detailed replies
Really interesting! I'm looking forward to the results.
I got medium-to-high numbers on four axes and 0 on one. Alex got two 0s, two medium-low and one high. We were wryly amused that his high one was my 0.
My wife and I both got zero on four dimensions, leaving only a score on traditionalist (mine being somewhat higher than hers).
Very interesting that your high one was his 0!
I don't know either of you that well but from what I do know I'm not surprised that you came out as more right-wing overall than him, but with both having some areas you identified with much more strongly than others.
I had a lot of issues with the framing of the questions so I don't know how accurate my results were. I got nothing except 9% libertarian - but when the quiz was being made, how did you distinguish between anarchist and libertarian beliefs?
I can't comment on anarchist vs libertarian -- that's definitely a question for Iain.
Reading Iain's descriptions of the five archetypes, would you self-define as any of them?
Anarchism isn't a right-wing archetype, so the quiz doesn't explore it, any more than it does socialism.
Apologies to anyone who had issues trying the quiz yesterday (Friday 26th) and was unable to complete it. The server was under a lot of load from bots (which have been plaguing the Internet with increasingly disruptive behaviour over the past few months), and our server admin was travelling and therefore not in a position to fend them off.
To read more about bad bots, there is a downloadable report here:
https://www.imperva.com/resources/resource-library/reports/2026-bad-bot-report/
I was wondering where "law and order" fitted into this typology, and I went back and read the original post and saw you'd lumped it in with "Traditionalist". I'm not sure I'd agree with that.
I'm thinking of a strand of conservatism that believes things like:
* Sentencing is generally too lenient, sometimes outrageously so
* Life sentences should mean life, and N years should mean N years, not N/2 or N/3
* The main purpose of prison is to remove from society the small percentage who commit most of the crime
* The death penalty is appropriate in some cases
* Poverty is not a major driver of crime (especially crimes other than theft and fraud)
* Prison is too cushy, especially if it includes leisure/enrichment activities that people normally have to pay to do
* The police should perform searches and arrests based on who is committing crimes rather than to meet demographic quotas, and sentencing should be based on the severity of the crime and not on demographic quotas
* Society is too tolerant of petty crimes like vandalism
* Corporal punishment may be appropriate for some crimes, and may actually be rehabilitative because it's over and done rather than derailing someone's life by sending them to prison with other criminals
* Vandals should be made to either pay to repair the damage or physically fix it themselves
* People who tackle shoplifters are doing a public service and should be celebrated, not vilified or fired
And while there's clearly some correlation between this and your "Traditionalist" (just as there is between many other pairs of conservative archetypes), I think they're distinct enough that I'd want to spin it out into its own archetype.
For example, many futuristic-minded techbro-types, who are Anywheres rather than Somewheres, and who might want to live in (or even design) radically new societies that strongly break from tradition (charter cities, settlements on Mars, crypto-based economies, etc), are very pro- law and order. And someone like Rupert Lowe would probably agree with all of the above list, and he's not "a defender of the country’s institutions and structures", and is more of a "radical" than a believer in "incremental change".
And I think the law-and-order conservative can be a natural ally of the Libertarian and the Free Marketeer, as they all support "negative rights" to be left alone to peacefully enjoy one's property without it being either over-taxed, stolen, or vandalised, and to go anywhere and interact commercially or socially with anyone without needless risk to one's physical safety.
And what's left of the Traditionalist archetype (history, heritage, stability of institutions) could probably be lumped in with the Social Conservative, if you want to keep only five archetypes.
Interesting! I wonder if some of this is connected to the 'civil war in the Traditionalist' I refer to in the original piece?
I do agree that this is a distinct subtype within the Traditionalist (just as, in theory, Free Market and Low Tax can be separated out in the first). I think there is a clear philosophy which goes back to people like Burke and Scruton why these would go together, but you're right that in today's world there are people who are radicals who would support law and order but not some of the other things.
One thing we will be able to do with the results is see to what extent the 'authority' questions in the Traditionalist do indeed form a distinct cluster (and whether they correlate more with any of the other archetypes).
A survey good for sociology as these are "ideological" categories but less good for politics because voting is driven usually by the main economic interest of the voter rather than their cultural preferences.
Still there are voters who vote against their main economic interest because of deeply held cultural preferences (most obviously some "nativist" property owners are anti-immigration even if they realize that without massive immigration their housing income would halve and their living standards would collapse).
The people who vote on cultural preferences are precious to politicians because it usually costs public money to satisfy economic interests but usually satisfying a cultural preference does not require public money (for example allowing or forbidding same-sex marriage).
Large numbers of voters do, and always have, voted against their economic interests.
«Large numbers of voters do, and always have, voted against their economic interests.»
Indeed but they tend to be "tribal" that is they vote "their" party every time. It is usually "transactional" voter blocks following their economic interests who change their vote to punish governments that have failed to boost those economic interests.
For example the large switch of property-owning voters from the tory-globalist Conservatives to the tory-nationalist Reform is usually attributed to a switch of those voters from globalism ("leftism" in the sense of whiggism) to nationalism ("rightism" in sense of trad-conservativism) but I reckon that it is actually a protest vote due to property prices being on average flat since 2022, depriving property-owning voters of the large yearly amounts (redistributed entirely from the lower classes) they entitled themselves to.
«Large numbers of voters do, and always have, voted against their economic interests.»
«Indeed but they tend to be "tribal" that is they vote "their" party every time. It is usually "transactional" voter blocks following their economic interests who change their vote»
I have remembered a delightful example from Tony Blair himself in 1996:
http://www.britishpoliticalspeech.org/speech-archive.htm?speech=202
https://archive.org/stream/NewsUK1996UKEnglish/Oct%2002%201996%2C%20The%20Times%2C%20%2365699%2C%20UK%20%28en%29_djvu.txt
“I was canvassing in the Midlands on an ordinary suburban estate. I met a man polishing his Ford Sierra, self-employed electrician, Dad always voted Labour. He used to vote Labour, he said, but he bought his own home, he had set up his own business, he was doing quite nicely, so he said I’ve become a Tory.”
Posting my results here so I can refer to them in the future:
Free Marketeer 80%
Libertarian 63%
Traditionalist 50%
Social Conservative 15%
Nativist 0%
I'm a member of the Libertarian Party so this checks out. I'm surprised at Nativist 0% because I would describe myself as a (British) nationalist, but perhaps a nationalist and a nativist are very different things?
EDIT: I see I graded myself at the following scores (out of 10) in response to your original article:
Nativist: 9
Libertarian: 8
Free Marketer: 7
Social Conservative: 5
Traditionalist: 5
Either I'm a lot less Nativist than I think I am or there's something wrong with the questions.
Interesting! Most other people haven't found the nativist archetype coding incorrectly - maybe what you were thinking of as nativist came into traditionalist? Pride in history, patriotism, etc?