PolitiScales Test: Your Politics on Eight Scales

The PolitiScales test is a political values quiz first published in 2017 by French volunteers, who credited it to the online initiative Radicalisé·e·s sur Internet. It was built on the open-source code of 8values, but its statements, axes and results were written from scratch. Instead of one left-right line, the PolitiScales test describes your views as eight separate tensions.

The name joins politics and scales, which is why people also search for it as the political scales test. The quiz assumes you live in a multi-party system with a market economy, and some statements deal bluntly with race, gender, sexuality and violence. Answering them honestly is what makes the result worth reading.

This page runs the original PolitiScales quiz with its original scoring, in English, Portuguese and Spanish. Every statement, weight and threshold comes from the open-source edition, with only spelling and translation errors corrected.

The PolitiScales test has 117 statements. 111 of them feed the eight axes, with 14 statements behind each axis; one statement, on the death penalty, counts for both the society axis and the justice axis. The other six statements only decide the bonus traits. The order of the statements is shuffled every time.

You answer each statement with one of five buttons: Absolutely agree, Somewhat agree, Neutral or hesitant, Rather disagree and Absolutely disagree. A firm answer counts the full weight of a statement, a softer answer counts two-thirds and a neutral answer counts nothing. Every statement is worth 3 points to the side it supports, so each pole of an axis can collect at most 42 points.

Half of the statements on an axis are written for one pole and half for the other. Agreeing with a statement adds points to the pole it was written for, while disagreeing adds the same amount to the opposite pole. Your share for a pole is its points divided by 42, rounded to a whole percentage, and whatever is left over becomes the neutral share.

Constructivism vs essentialism asks why people are the way they are: shaped by society, or by an innate nature. Rehabilitative vs punitive justice asks whether courts should bring offenders back into society or deter crime through punishment. Progressism vs conservatism weighs social change against tradition, and internationalism vs nationalism weighs common humanity against the priority of one's own nation.

Communism vs capitalism is about who should own the means of production, public bodies or private owners. Regulationism vs laissez-faire is about how far the state should steer a market economy through laws, taxes and subsidies. The two economic axes are kept apart, so a person can accept private ownership and still want a tightly regulated market.

Ecology vs productivism sets the protection of ecosystems against growth, output and technology. Revolution vs reformism concerns method rather than goals: direct action and a break with the current system, or legal, gradual change through institutions. Together the eight axes of the PolitiScales test cover human nature, justice, society, nation, ownership, markets, environment and strategy.

Besides the eight axes, the PolitiScales quiz can award up to seven bonus traits: anarchism, pragmatism, radical feminism, conspiracism, veganism, monarchism and a religious missionary trait. They appear in a separate box, and only when your answers pass a fixed threshold.

Six traits rest on a single statement each. Pragmatism, veganism, monarchism and the missionary trait need at least Somewhat agree, while anarchism and conspiracism need Absolutely agree. Radical feminism works differently: it is calculated from seven statements on gender, sexuality and family spread over two axes, and it needs more than 90% of their possible points.

A bonus trait is not a verdict on your whole profile. It flags one strong position that the axes would otherwise hide, such as a firm belief that the state should be abolished.

Your PolitiScales results show eight bars, one per axis. Each bar has three parts: the share for the left pole, the share for the right pole and a grey neutral share in the middle. A bar of 64% ecology, 21% productivism and 15% neutral shows a clear lean to one side.

The neutral share grows with every neutral answer and, more slowly, with every softer answer, because those count only two-thirds. Two people with the same lean can therefore end up with bars of different length: one answered with conviction, the other with caution.

Above the bars sits a motto of up to three words, such as Equality · Humanity · Ecology, taken from your strongest leanings. The PolitiScales test does not match you to a named ideology; the eight bars and any bonus traits are the result.

12 Axes is the main test on this site. It scores twelve axes in four groups and lets you choose 36, 60 or 288 statements, answered on a seven-step scale. The PolitiScales test has a fixed set of 117 statements, eight axes and a five-step scale.

The results are built differently too. 12 Axes gives one percentage per axis, so 62% for one side means 38% for the other, and it then matches you with ideologies, countries and historical figures. PolitiScales keeps your neutral answers visible as a share of their own and adds bonus traits instead of matches.

The two tests overlap on economics, nation and tradition, but PolitiScales has axes that 12 Axes does not, such as constructivism vs essentialism, rehabilitative vs punitive justice and revolution vs reformism. Taking both gives a fuller picture than either one alone.

The PolitiScales test is a tool for reflection, not a scientific instrument. Its statements were written by volunteers, nobody has validated the axes statistically, and the result depends on how you read short and sometimes provocative sentences.

Some statements reflect French and European debates around 2017, such as the retirement age or chauvinism at sports events, so they may read differently in the Americas or elsewhere. Most bonus traits hang on a single answer, which makes them sensitive to one click.

Use your PolitiScales results as a starting point. Ask yourself why a bar landed where it did, compare results with friends, and treat any surprise as a question to think about rather than a fact about you.

This is an independent, unofficial version based on the original MIT-licensed edition of PolitiScales. The statements, axes, weights and bonus rules come from that open-source edition, whose licence carries the 2017 copyright notice of 8values, the project its code was built on.

The PolitiScales project has since continued under the same name, and the current official version lives at politiscales.party. That project is not affiliated with this site, and this site is not affiliated with the original authors or with 8values.

The Portuguese and Spanish translations also come from the original project. We corrected spelling and translation mistakes in all three languages but did not change the meaning of any statement or the way answers are counted.