Want to know which political party fits one’s viewpoint? Look no further than the World’s Shortest Political Quiz [1]. I first took this quiz as a senior at Sullivan South High School in Kingsport when a friend of mine, who was a self-proclaimed Libertarian, published the quiz and the associated Nolan Chart (see figure below) in our school newspaper. The Internet was not a thing back in those days. After lunch one day, my friends and I sat around and charted our answers with our yellow “No. 2” pencils [2] to discover what political label suited us best. The year was 1987, which is the year when Marshall Fritz created the quiz. Fritz is the founder of the Advocates for Self-Government, a non-profit organization that seeks to raise educational awareness of Libertarianism. Though the organization promotes Libertarian positions, the association is non-partisan and not affiliated with a particular political party. Fritz created the quiz, primarily for an American audience, out of frustration with one-dimensional characterizations of the political spectrum into “left-right” or “liberal-conservative” labels. These labels translate to the two major parties of Democrat and Republican and thus leave no room for the Libertarian label. Fritz and the Advocates for Self-Government needed a tool to overcome this one-dimensional view of the political spectrum.
At some point, Fritz came across the work of fellow Libertarian David Nolan and the Nolan Chart. Nolan was also frustrated with the one-dimensional categorization of politics, and he thus developed the chart to expand the spectrum into a two-dimensional representation. Nolan developed his chart in 1969, but others before him created the concept of locating political positions in two dimensions rather than one. Unlike prior representations, Nolan’s insight was that the two dimensions should follow the general categories of economic and personal freedoms, and he further created a two-axis graph to support his insight. Nolan, who founded the Libertarian party, first published his version of the chart in January 1971 in an article titled “Classifying and Analyzing Politico-Economic Systems” in a monthly political magazine called The Individualist.
The traditional form of the Nolan Chart.
As shown in the figure, the chart has two axes: one axis labeled “economic freedom” and the other axis labeled “personal freedom.” The chart is further divided into five sections to categorize political viewpoints based on the axes. A Democrat today would typically support less economic freedom and more personal freedom, thus placing their position on the chart where the label “liberal” would appear. By contrast, a Republican would likely support more economic freedom and less personal freedom, resulting in a “conservative” label on the chart. David Nolan’s Libertarians would support more economic freedom and personal freedom with their label appearing at the top of the figure. The least common political viewpoint—at least in American politics—is the fourth label of Statism, which supports less economic freedom and less personal freedom and appears as a label at the bottom. Finally, the center of the Nolan Chart carries the obvious label of Centrist and represents a balance of both economic and personal freedom.
Fritz’s innovation in 1987 was to combine Nolan’s 1969 chart with a short ten-question survey to help folks plot their political position on the chart and discover what label might fit them. Fritz divided his survey into two groups of five questions with one group for economic questions and the other for personal freedom. The questions have one of three answers: agree, maybe, or disagree; and the answers have associated scores of twenty points, ten points, or zero, respectively. One can tally each group of questions separately, resulting in a group score from a minimum of zero to a maximum of 100. Then one can plot each group score on the appropriate axis to identify what category describes one’s political position. Fritz and the Advocates for Self-Government have revised and refined the ten questions over the years to remove bias and override skepticism. The initial form of the quiz was on a small business card with the Nolan Chart, questions, and instructions printed on both sides. The Advocates website reports that more than seven million of these cards are in circulation and also claims the quiz was the first political quiz on the Internet. After the initial appearance in my high school newspaper, my Libertarian friend used to pass out these cards, and I likely have one stuffed away in my high school annual or some other memorabilia nook.
The Nolan chart and Fritz’s quiz are useful tools—as Fritz intended—to help explain political philosophies in America beyond the one-dimensional left-right line. The two-dimensional model, in some regards, is also too simplistic to capture the full spectrum of American political thought, but as the statistician George Box once famously observed, “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” Both models fall short of the complexities of American politics, but both are also useful nonetheless. The Nolan-Fritz model illuminates the Libertarian philosophy, which does not fit within the confines of the left-right model. The chart and quiz also help explain why the Libertarian Party struggles for relevance in the American two-party system. As I have established in my book The Art of the Compromise, the American system, through a set of non-obvious invisible “hands,” is a two-party system that over time has become canonized into the Democratic and Republican parties. Yet, these two political parties are not static in their political platforms as they have ebbed and flowed over time, though slowly, in a political tug-of-war where one party may take on a political plank that another party held a few decades prior. The Libertarian party seems to be stuck as a political outsider who is only able to observe this tug of war and is not able to participate in it. The reason is that the opposite political philosophy on the Nolan chart to Libertarianism is Statism.
The reason is that the opposite political philosophy on the Nolan chart to Libertarianism is Statism.
Statism is a political philosophy that is unable to gain footing in America. Statism in the extreme is an authoritarian form of government where the state has substantial centralized control over both the economic and personal affairs of citizens, as evident in the Nolan Chart. Americans may turn to the government to curb economic freedoms as modern Democrats are accused or to curtail personal freedoms as modern Republicans are accused, but deeply rooted in the American psyche since our founding as a nation is a distrust for letting government control too much. The Statism philosophy, on the other hand, of letting the government control both economic and personal reins is a bridge too far for many Americans, and thus few Americans embrace Statism as a political philosophy.
The result is that pure Libertarianism in America has no natural foil. Libertarians have to remain on the sidelines watching the Democrats and Republicans duke it out because Libertarians have no common enemy. Nor do they have a common friend with whom they can consistently cluster. They can identify with Democrats on some issues and Republicans on others, but as the Nolan Chart shows, the barren lands of Statism—full government control—on the opposite corner of the chart offer no competition for the American political mind. When a new government program proposed by Democrats or Republicans attempts to expand government into either the economic or personal realms, the other party can nurture the predisposition of Americans to oppose such reaches for more government power. Libertarians cannot. To paraphrase James Carville, the well-known Democratic strategist, politicians must be good storytellers, and good stories need villains[3].
Libertarians have no villain on the opposite corner of the Nolan Chart. Libertarians struggle to gain popularity as a political party because they do not have a single, common enemy in a non-existent American Statist Party. Statism as a political philosophy is not viable in the United States. To be a Statist in the US is taboo while to be a Libertarian is perhaps frustrating. The result is that a political shorthand is to collapse the two dimensions from Nolan into a single left-right dimension to label voters as either Democrat or Republican.
What is interesting, however, is that many Americans do express specific viewpoints that align with both Libertarian and Statist political philosophies, but they do not self-associate with those labels because voters, particularly in a two-party system, like to be winners—that is on the winning side of elections. Emily Ekins in a 2017 blog post on the website of the Libertarian-leaning Cato Institute took on the debate as to how many Libertarian voters are in the United States. A Pew Research poll from 2014 says that only 11 percent of Americans self-identify as Libertarians, but Ekins’s investigation casts doubt on that number as she found many Americans on the order of 20 percent, depending on the researcher and how they collected their data, hold Libertarian viewpoints on political questions. She also found that many Americans also hold Statist viewpoints though few folks are unwilling to self-identify with Statism as a political philosophy. Ekins surveyed different methods from the academic literature and compiled her review into the blog post. Consistent with the literature, she concludes that “the overwhelming body of empirical evidence suggests that libertarians’ share of the electorate is likely somewhere between 10-20% and the conservative and liberal shares’ aren’t that much greater.”
the overwhelming body of empirical evidence suggests that libertarians’ share of the electorate is likely somewhere between 10-20% and the conservative and liberal shares’ aren’t that much greater.
Emily Elkins
What these data suggest is that when American voters are asked specific questions along the two economic-personal freedoms dimensions, their resultant answers in isolation may appear evenly scattered across each quadrant of the Nolan Chart, but when voters are asked to self-identify, they bundle their isolated answers to collapse into one left-right dimension because few Americans [4] would self-identify with government-heavy Statism. This cascades into isolating Libertarians without an opposing enemy, and thus they are unable to unseat the Democrats and the Republicans for control over the one-dimension political reality of a two-party system.
Both Nolan and Fritz were Libertarians and they wanted to create their chart and quiz to illuminate the broader spectrum of political philosophies in the United States beyond the left-right model. The irony is that the Nolan Chart and the World’s Shortest Political Quiz do educate Americans, but they also help to explain why the Libertarian party is unable to become a robust third party inside the American political system.
This argument begs the question of whether or not we should push for a three-party system to make room for the Libertarian Party. We could, but as the saying goes two is company, and three is a crowd. Assuming that we could formulate mechanisms either through Constitutional amendments or other ways to enable the Libertarian party to thrive as a third party to compete with the Democrats and Republicans, the data from Ekins indicates that the electorate would likely distribute somewhat evenly across the three parties with one-third of voters identifying as Democrats, one-third as Republicans, and one-third as Libertarians. This crowd of three parties would lead to an untenable political system at the Federal level. The potential would exist where three different parties could be in control of each of the different branches of government. The House of Representatives would likely not have a clear governing majority from one party, and thus coalition governments would be necessary for the productive operation of Congress.
If one believes that split governments with two parties leads to gridlock, three parties will fare worse. An important element that weaves through our Constitution is that majorities, in particular large geographically diverse majorities, are the desired method for governing. The crowd of three parties would have difficulty achieving the type of majority that our Constitution demands. Though our Founders did not particularly like parties, they did build the Constitution to prefer consensus through large diverse majorities to maintain the large Republic. A two-party system therefore works with the Constitutional preference for majorities whereas three or more parties reduce the likelihood of a “ruling majority” party and thus work against the Constitutional constructs.
A Libertarian Party is a cool idea in principle but a terrible idea in practice as the Fritz-Nolan chart illustrates.
Footnotes
[1] The quiz is available at https://www.theadvocates.org/quiz/.
[2] The “No. 2” pencil is a fond memory of my primary and secondary education. My generation saw the introduction of “bubble sheets” as the preferred method for automated scanning systems to score standardized tests. The introduction of the Scantron system in 1972 dictated that the “No. 2” pencil was the optimal “lead” hardness for the Scantron imaging system to recognize the bubble shaded in by the student. Pencils do not contain lead, but rather, pencils are a mixture of graphite and clay where the ratio determines the hardness. Too much graphite and the pencil markings are too “soft” and smudge on the page. Conversely, too much clay and not enough graphite, and the pencil is too “hard” and the markings appear light and faded, which is difficult for optical scanners to capture. As a result, the “No. 1” pencils are too soft and prone to smudging, and the “No. 2” offers the balance necessary. Modern bubble scanners are more resilient and the requirement for the “No. 2” is no longer necessary, but the legend lives on.
[3] James Carville, a native Louisianan known as the Ragin’ Cajun, served as the lead campaign strategist in Bill Clinton’s winning 1992 Presidential run. Carville is known for his colorful metaphors, and he is a popular pundit on cable news programs.
[4] Editor Charles Rodriguez has collected an anthology that discusses the dangers of statism in “Statism: The Shadows of Another Night.” These essays serve as a foundation for why few reasonable Americans adopt statism. A notable quote popular among Republican politicians—though the origins are difficult to derive—that captures the unattractiveness of statism as a political identity is “a government that is big enough to give you whatever you want is big enough to take away everything you have.” Given the American ethos is antithetical in many ways to full government control, Statism is not a viable political party in the US.
References
Box, G. E. (1976). Science and statistics. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 71(356), 791-799.
Doherty, B. (2009). Radicals for capitalism: A freewheeling history of the modern American libertarian movement. Public Affairs.
Ekins, E. (2017, June 21). How Many Libertarians Are There? The Answer Depends on the Method You Use. Cato.org. https://www.cato.org/blog/how-many-libertarians-are-there-answer-depends-method-you-use
Kim, Y., Sung, A., Seo, Y., Hwang, S., & Kim, H. (2016). Measurement of hardness and friction properties of pencil leads for quantification of pencil hardness test. Advances in Applied Ceramics, 115(8), 443-448.
Nolan, D. (1971). Classifying and analyzing politico-economic systems. The Individualist, 1, 5-11.
Olsø, R. (2021). Behind the Curtain of Power: How Karl Rove, David Axelrod, Roger Ailes, James Carville, Dick Morris, and Lee Atwater Won the Toughest Race in the World and Changed America. Dorrance Publishing Co.
Page, D. L. (2024). The Art of the Compromise: Returning American Democracy to Better Days. Warped Minds Press.
Rodriguez, C. (2015). Statism: The shadows of another night. Fortress Book Service, Tanglewood Publishing.
World’s smallest political quiz – advocates for self-government. The Advocates for Self-Government. (2021, June 19). https://www.theadvocates.org/quiz/