Blank political compass

What the four quadrants mean

The chart is two independent scales crossed at a centre point, which is what makes it more interesting than a single left-to-right line. The horizontal axis is economic: how much of the economy should be owned, planned or redistributed collectively (left) against how much should be left to private ownership and markets (right). The vertical axis is about authority: how much power the state should have over how people live (authoritarian, at the top) against how little (libertarian, at the bottom).

Authoritarian left, the top left corner, combines a collectivised or heavily planned economy with a strong state. Twentieth-century state socialism is the example usually placed here.

Authoritarian right, the top right corner, combines private ownership and markets with a strong state and enforced social order. Nationalist and traditionalist conservatism is usually placed here.

Libertarian left, the bottom left corner, wants the collective economy without the strong state: cooperatives, communes and self-organised labour rather than central planning. Anarchism and libertarian socialism sit here.

Libertarian right, the bottom right corner, combines free markets with a minimal state in both economic and social life. Right-libertarianism and minarchism sit here.

It is a simplification, and that is the point of it. Two axes cannot hold every political question, and plenty of positions land in the middle, which is why the centre is a real answer rather than a cop-out. Placing something near an edge is a claim, and the argument that follows is what these charts are for.

What the blank compass gives you

The blank above opens the chart with the four standard labels already in place, pastel quadrants, and nothing on it. That is the whole starting state, and it is ready to export as it stands if what you wanted was an empty compass to fill in by hand later.

Everything on it is editable. The four pole labels are ordinary text you can type over. The quadrant colours can be changed. Anything you place, whether that is a photograph, a line of text, a shape or a freehand scribble, can be moved anywhere at all: nothing snaps to a grid and nothing is trapped inside one quadrant, so a point can sit exactly on an axis when that is the honest answer.

How to fill one in

Two minutes of work, most of which is deciding what goes near the middle.

1. Open the blank compass. It arrives with the four labels in place and nothing placed on it.
2. Add what you are plotting: upload pictures, type text labels, or use both together so a face carries a name.
3. Drag each item to where you think it belongs. Zoom in when a corner gets crowded.
4. Set the export crop so the finished picture is the compass and nothing else, then download the PNG or publish it as a page you can link to.

Using it as a plain four-quadrant template

None of this is tied to politics. The four labels are free text, so the same blank chart works as a general quadrant template the moment you rename them: effort against reward, price against quality, risk against payoff, overrated against underrated.

That is why plenty of the compasses people publish here have nothing to do with parties or policy. The layout is the useful part, because two axes force a real answer in a way a ranked list never does.

• Political compass maker: the editor itself, including charts with more than four quadrants.
• Community compasses: finished compasses people have published here.

Publish a compass template of your own

A template here is a compass somebody left open on purpose. Name the two axes, place nothing or only the few items that set the tone, and choose "Publish as template" rather than "Publish as chart" when you publish. Everyone who opens it starts from your axes with the placing left to them.

Axis pairs are the scarce thing, not compasses. A well-chosen pair of axes gets used by dozens of people; a filled-in compass gets looked at once.

Every template here started as somebody's own compass. Open the political compass maker to make one from scratch.