Eight political axes

2026-01-04 📖 4 min

Web Dataviz

8values

Today will be a very short article: I was discussing of stuff online with people, and I did not agree. It was about politics, letft/right division, values, etc. There is a classification that tries to be more granular, and provides 8 different values (on 4 axes):

You can test it online, for example on this static website.

Analysis of the test

I have absolutely zero knownledge about the relevance of such a thingy, but I found it interesting.

Positionning reference points

In the debate, there were different persons or personas mentioned. Given that I do not know the position of the "average libertarian in the 1900s", I asked some LLM to give some scores for each value for each persona. It's very wrong to proceed like that, but I'm playing, and it's probably less wrong than if I'm doing it myself, guessing the scores.

Data-driven chart

I tend to favor client-side, data-driven visualizations. This is such a case, even though it will not show anything if you are reading me from a feed reader (Bravo!) or without JavaScript enabled. However, I took on me (wow!) to host the JavaScript libraries used myself.

In practice, I have used Vega-Lite, and you can access the specification used by either checking the source of this page, or using the actions available in the menu next to the chart itself.

The chart

Note

This article does not go into much details about anything, but I needed to work out the visualization I wanted for such a question, so it's partially for documenting it for myself. It may be usefule for others, I do not know. It's my no-effort November post, but it enabled be to close a browser tab that was sitting open for way too long.