The SapplyValues test: a political compass with a third axis

The SapplyValues test is an online political quiz built around the familiar two-axis political compass. It measures where you stand on economics, from left to right, and on the power of the state, from liberty to authority. A third axis then rates you from conservative to progressive on personal and cultural questions such as sex, religion, drugs and punishment.

SapplyValues took the statements of the Sapply political compass test and placed them in the interface of 8values, the four-axis quiz from 2017. The GitHub user theacrat started the project in April 2020 and reworded a few statements that were judged poorly written. The result was a shorter quiz that saves a full compass image and keeps your scores in the result link.

This page offers SapplyValues with the original 46 statements and the original scoring. Whether you know it as SapplyValues or as the Sapply values test, the questions and the maths are the same. It is free, needs no account and is available in English, Portuguese and Spanish.

The SapplyValues test shows 46 statements one at a time. For each one you choose Strongly agree, Agree, Neutral or unsure, Disagree or Strongly disagree, and most people finish the SapplyValues quiz in about 7 minutes.

Every statement belongs to exactly one axis: 15 to the economic axis, 15 to the authority axis and 16 to the culture axis. Strongly agree counts 1, Agree 0.5, Neutral 0, Disagree −0.5 and Strongly disagree −1, and the sign flips for statements written from the opposite side. Agreeing that freedom of business is the best way for a society to prosper moves you right, while agreeing that all industry and the banks should be nationalised moves you left.

Your score on each axis is 10 × your total ÷ the number of statements on that axis, shown here to one decimal. That puts every axis on a scale from −10 to +10, where 0 is the exact centre. Because each axis has only 15 or 16 statements, a single answer can move a score by up to about 0.67 points.

Economic axis, Left against Right. A negative score in the SapplyValues test means you favour regulation, redistribution and public or shared ownership. A positive score means you favour free enterprise, private property, low taxes on the wealthy and wages set by the market.

Authority axis, Liberty against Authority. A negative score means you want a smaller, less intrusive state with strong civil liberties and democratic limits on power. A positive score means you accept surveillance, structure and bureaucracy as the price of order and security.

Culture axis, Conservative against Progressive. A negative score reflects traditional morals and support for laws that uphold them, such as drug bans, the death penalty and parents' authority over children. A positive score puts personal autonomy first in matters of sex, the body, worship and identity, even when the majority disapproves.

Your SapplyValues results are a position rather than a label. The economic and authority scores become a dot on a 20 by 20 grid, which is the SapplyValues political compass, and the culture score becomes a mark on a separate vertical bar with Progressive at the top and Conservative at the bottom.

The four quarters of the compass carry the usual names: authoritarian left at the top left, authoritarian right at the top right, libertarian left at the bottom left and libertarian right at the bottom right. A dot at x = −3.5 and y = 2 sits in the authoritarian left, close enough to the centre that a few answers could move it.

SapplyValues does not match you with a named ideology. The original authors left that step out, so the three numbers are the whole result. The culture bar is often the most telling part, because two people on the same compass dot can sit far apart on it.

12 Axes, the main test on this site, shares the same family tree: it reworked 9Axes, which was built on 8values, the quiz whose interface SapplyValues uses. Both tests report your political compass position, but 12 Axes adds ten more axes, offers 36, 60 or 288 statements on a seven-point scale and names your closest ideologies.

SapplyValues is quicker and easier to share as a single picture. Its three numbers are a good summary if you mainly want to know your quadrant and how progressive or conservative you are.

If your SapplyValues results put you near the centre on an axis where you hold strong but mixed views, a longer test can separate the topics. 12 Axes scores trade, immigration, religion, the military and technology separately, so it can show where the mix comes from.

SapplyValues is a tool for reflection, not a validated scientific instrument. Its statements were written for an online, mostly English-speaking audience, and nobody has tested the scales in research or measured how stable scores are between attempts.

Several statements are blunt on purpose, such as "Multiculturalism is bad" or "The police were not created to protect the people", and some refer to ideas that are less common outside the United States and the United Kingdom, such as jury nullification. With only 15 or 16 statements per axis, a handful of answers you feel unsure about can shift your dot noticeably.

Treat your result from SapplyValues as a starting point. Look at which statements pushed you furthest, compare the result with your own reasons, and try a longer test if one axis surprises you.

This is an independent, unofficial version of SapplyValues. It is based on the open-source SapplyValues project, released on GitHub under the MIT licence, and it is not affiliated with or endorsed by the SapplyValues authors or the creator of the original Sapply test.

The 46 statements, the axis each belongs to and the scoring formula come from the original code without changes, so your scores here match the original SapplyValues quiz. The Portuguese and Spanish versions were translated for this site.

The SapplyValues licence keeps two copyright notices, one for 8values and one for SapplyValues, because the project grew out of the 8values code. Credit for the statements and the scoring belongs to those projects and their contributors.