Do people want to see a version with names?
by the way, this picture can be updated, so please keep posting your scores and I'll add the points! tens of millions of people stand to see their lives ruined because the bureaucrats at the ECB don't understand introductory economics -- Dean Baker
In other words: Go For It, Man.
As an example of a question like this:
"Public broadcasters should never receive moeny from the state." (I can't remember the exact wording.)
In the UK at least, whilst there is a set of people who are so anti-BBC they might vote "Strongly Agree" it is practically assured that most people will vote "Disagree" or "Strongly Disagree" because the number of people who believe that the BBC should get NO state funding is very small. The problem is, this question does nothing to discriminate (for example) between Tories, Lib Dems, Labour and SWP in the UK, but it will clearly put US Dems in the left and US Repubs on the right because this is something they have a sharp disagreement about.
In any case, it's meant to be global. The Tories haven't been all that far right traditionally.
i.e. The graph of the community is largely accurate, so long as you extrapolate up from 130 to a bigger number and realise there are enough outliers on the right to make a conversation.
Atlantic Review's experience is it's only those on the right who really read/comment on European issues (and I would argue on foreign affairs generally.) Since those are the diaries we actually look at, it follows that we would experience a more "rightward" dKos than we would expect.
Dammit, I should really write a diary for him, but I think his deadline is too tight at this time.
With that caveat:
Politics has to be relevant and comprehensible. Foreign politics, like domestic politics, are only meaningful in so far as they impact you as an individual. So berating citizens of one country for being disinterested in the politics of countries with minimal impact on their life is kinda beside the point. I doubt the British have much more awareness of German politics than Americans do. keep to the Fen Causeway
To the majority of Americans (therefore including a fair number who count themselves on the left), free enterprise is a fundamental value, and it means the absolute freedom of the entrepreneur. Their view of employer/employee relations is not realistic, it belongs to the domain of belief. It's just axiomatic, a "no-brainer" to them, that there is a simple common-law contract between employer and employee and that the situation is naturally equitable. They can't conceive of the idea that the employer is almost always in a position of power relative to the employee. That law, jurisprudence, or government arbitration should attempt to define a more equitable framework offering the employee some guarantees, seems to them just unwarranted and even crazy interference.
OTOH, there were plenty of Kossacks on that CPE thread yesterday, who didn't take that view. They were union guys. There may be a chicken/egg problem there -- did they join a union because their way of thinking led them there, or did they develop that way of thinking after joining a union? Whichever, they were aware of the existence of a balance of power.
Oh, and the first group, who seem to me mainstream Americans who buy into the main myth structure, might still give answers to many questions in the PolComp that would place them in the lower left quadrant. Not far left on Economy, further down on Libertarian.
