About

The Political Compass is a two-axis model of the political spectrum between libertarian/authoritarian and economic-left/economic-right. Similar to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, it is a model with websites that invite users to take a survey to see where they stand. It has spawned many parody edits.

Origin

The term "political compass" has been trademarked by Pace News Limited since 2001, and the graph was created by Politicalcompass.org,^[1] which was registered on December 20th, 2000.^[6] It consists of Economic Right/Left on the horizontal axis and Authoritarian-Libertarian on the vertical axis. The resulting sectors are Authoritarian Right/Left and Libertarian Right/Left.

Spread

Since 2004, the political compass website has covered several elections in English-speaking countries.

While the political compass website has come under fire for its lack of clear methodology,^[2] it remains a popular political model.

Parody Edits

The political compass model has made for many parody edits. Variations can be found featuring memes, fandoms and generally mocking the political spectrum. The first parody edit appears to have occurred on August 29th, 2012, in a Warosu.org thread (shown below).^[4]

The next few years would see several edits, until March 2016, when political compass parodies began appearing with more regularity. On March 15th, an Imgur post^[5] compiled eight political compass memes from the previous years. Soon, political compass memes expanded to include pop culture references, much like Alignment Charts. Popular pop culture variations include SpongeBob SquarePants and The Simpsons. A Facebook page dedicated to Political Compass Memes^[3] appeared on Facebook on June 15th, 2016, and acquired over 6,000 likes as of September 19th, 2016.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References