Political and Economic Spectrums Twenty-one Wikipedia Articles PDF generated using the open source mwlib toolkit. See http://code.pediapress.com/ for more information. PDF generated at: Wed, 01 Feb 2012 23:45:30 UTC Contents Articles Political spectrum 1 Left–right politics 11 Sinistrisme 16 Cleavage (politics) 17 Biology and political orientation 18 Left-wing politics 22 Right-wing politics 31 Neoclassical economics 38 Keynesian economics 43 Neoclassical synthesis 53 Socialism 54 Democratic socialism 78 Classical economics 84 Localism (politics) 88 Protectionism 92 Libertarianism 99 Green politics 107 Local food 114 Communitarianism 118 Anarchism 123 Communism 148 References Article Sources and Contributors 168 Image Sources, Licenses and Contributors 176 Article Licenses License 178 Political spectrum 1 Political spectrum A political spectrum is a way of modeling different political positions by placing them upon one or more geometric axes symbolizing independent political dimensions. Most long-standing spectra include a right wing and left wing, which originally referred to seating arrangements in the 18th century French parliament. According to the simplest left-right axis, communism and socialism are usually regarded internationally as being on the left, opposite fascism and conservatism on the right. Liberalism can mean different things in different contexts, sometimes on the left, sometimes on the right. However, researchers have frequently noted that a single left-right axis is insufficient in describing the existing variation in political beliefs, and often include other axes. Though the descriptive words at polar This chart proposed by the Political Compass Organization, which opposites may vary, often in popular biaxial spectra the extends from -10 to +10 on each axis, is one of several competing axes are split between cultural issues and economic models. issues, each scaling from some form of individualism (or government for the freedom of the individual) to some form of communitarianism (or government for the welfare of the community). In this context, the left is often considered individualist (or libertarian) on social/cultural issues and communitarian (or populist) on economic issues, while the right is often considered communitarian (or populist) on social/cultural issues and individualist (or libertarian) on economic issues. Political spectrum 2 Historical origin of the terms The terms Right and Left refer to political affiliations which originated early in the French Revolutionary era of 1789-1796, and referred originally to the seating arrangements in the various legislative bodies of France. The aristocracy sat on the right of the Speaker (traditionally the seat of honor) and the commoners sat on the Left, hence the terms Right-wing politics and Left-wing politics. Originally, the defining point on the ideological spectrum was the ancien régime ("old order"). "The Right" thus implied support for aristocratic or royal interests, and the church, while "The An example of a biaxial political spectrum chart; it is a variant of the Left" implied support for Nolan chart. republicanism, secularism and civil liberties.[1] Because the political franchise at the start of the revolution was relatively narrow, the original "Left" represented mainly the interests of the bourgeoisie, the rising capitalist class. At that time, support for laissez-faire capitalism and Free markets were counted as being on the left; today in most Western countries these views would be characterized as being on the Right. As the franchise expanded over the next several years, it became clear that there was something to the left of that original "Left": the precursors of socialism and communism, advocating location=Westport}}</ref> Clickable. the interests of workers and peasants. Academic investigation For almost a century, social scientists have considered the problem of how best to describe political variation; a sample of their results is given below. Political spectrum 3 Early research In 1950, Leonard W. Ferguson carried out an analysis of political values using ten scales measuring attitudes toward: • Birth control • Capital punishment • Censorship • Communism • Evolution • Law • Patriotism • Theism • Treatment of criminals • War Submitting the results to factor analysis, he was able to identify three factors, which he named Religionism, Humanitarianism, and Nationalism. Leonard Ferguson's Religionism was defined by belief in God and negative attitudes toward evolution and birth control; Humanitarianism was related to attitudes opposing the harsh treatment of criminals, capital punishment, and war; and Nationalism described variation in opinions on censorship, law, patriotism, and communism. This system was derived empirically; rather than devising a political model on purely theoretical grounds and testing it, Ferguson's research was exploratory. Although replication of the Nationalism factor was inconsistent, the finding of Religionism and Humanitarianism had a number of replications by Ferguson and others.[2][3] Eysenck's research Shortly afterward, Hans Eysenck began researching political attitudes in Great Britain. He believed that there was something existentially similar about the National Socialists or Nazis on the one hand, and the Communists on the other, despite their opposite positions on the left-right axis. As Hans Eysenck described in his 1956 book Sense and Nonsense in Psychology,[4] Eysenck compiled a list of political statements found in newspapers and political tracts and asked subjects to rate their agreement or disagreement with each. Submitting this value questionnaire to the same process of factor analysis used by Ferguson, Eysenck found two factors, which he named "Radicalism" (R-factor) and "Tender-Mindedess" (T-factor). Eysenck's R-factor is easily identified as the classical "left-right" dimension, although the T-factor is less intuitive; high-scorers favored pacifism, racial equality, religious education, and restrictions on abortion, while low-scorers had attitudes more friendly to militarism, harsh punishment, easier divorce laws, and companionate marriage. Despite the difference in methodology, location, and theory, the results attained by Eysenck and Ferguson matched; simply rotating Eysenck's two factors 45 degrees renders the same factors of Religionism and Humanitarianism identified by Ferguson in America.[5] Hans J. Eysenck was an outspoken opponent of what he perceived as the authoritarian abuses of the left and right, and accordingly he believed that, with this T axis, he had found the link between nazism and communism: according to Eysenck's research findings, members of both ideologies were tough-minded. Central to Eysenck's thesis was the claim that tender-minded ideologies were democratic and friendly to human freedoms, while tough-minded ideologies were aggressive and authoritarian. Although he was a longstanding opponent of nazism, having left Nazi Germany to live in Britain, Eysenck was not shy in attacking communism, noting the anti-Semitic prejudices of the Russian communist government, the luxurious lifestyles of the USSR's leaders despite their talk about equality and the poverty of their people, and the Orwellian "doublethink" of East Germany's naming itself the German Democratic Republic despite being "one of the Political spectrum 4 most undemocratic regimes in the world today."[6] Accordingly, he carried out studies on nazism and communist groups, finding members of both groups to be more dominant, and more aggressive, than control groups.[5] At the time, Hans J. Eysenck's conception of 'tough-mindedness' was criticized for a number of reasons. • Firstly, virtually no values were found to load only on the tough/tender dimension. • Secondly, his interpretation of tough-mindedness as a manifestation of "authoritarian" versus tender-minded "democratic" values was incompatible with the Frankfurt school's single-axis model, which conceptualized authoritarianism as being a fundamental manifestation of conservatism, and many researchers took issue with the idea of "left-wing authoritarianism."[7] • Thirdly, the theory which Eysenck developed to explain individual variation in the observed dimensions, relating tough-mindedness to Extroversion and Psychoticism, returned ambiguous research results.[8] • Lastly, Eysenck's finding that nazists and communists were more tough-minded than members of mainstream political movements was criticised on technical grounds by Milton Rokeach.[9] Despite the problems of Hans J. Eysenck's model, his dimensions of R and T were found by factor analyses of values in Germany and Sweden,[10] France,[5] and Japan.[11] One interesting result Eysenck noted in his 1956 work was that in the United States and Great Britain, most of the political variance was subsumed by the left/right axis, while in France, the T-axis was larger, and in the Middle East, the only dimension to be found was the T-axis: "Among mid-Eastern Arabs it has been found that while the tough-minded/tender-minded dimension is still clearly expressed in the relationships observed between different attitudes, there is nothing that corresponds to the radical-conservative continuum."[5] Rokeach's research Dissatisfied with Hans J. Eysenck's work, Milton Rokeach developed his own two-axis model of political values in 1973, basing this on the ideas of freedom and equality, which he described in his book, The Nature of Human Values.[12] Milton Rokeach claimed that the defining difference between the