This is politicalsurvey, based on the work of the late Chris Lightfoot.

I will be updating this survey and harmonizing some of the question wordings
so that it will function with the most recent American National Election 
Survey panel results (available here: http://www.electionstudies.org/studypages/download/datacenter_all.htm) Also I would like to investigate the feasibility
of incorporating data from Eurostat.

My interest in this is primarily because even though I am a political scientist
and statistician, I generally despise discussion of American politics and voting
as, to me, so little of it seems evidence-based. Chris Lightfoot's idea of categorizing people based not on somebody's idea of what the political spectrum is,
but deriving the political spectrum from people's positions on issues makes
much more sense to me. This treats the political spectrum and its axes as
endogenous variables: one's politics are the result of one's opinions which are
shaped by and linked to each other. 

The purpose of politicalsurvey is sort of like other surveys you might have
seen on the Internet. However, unlike those other surveys, the results of
where the survey-taker stands on a chart are not determined by the hosts of 
the survey, rather, the axes of the survey are determined by aggregate response
to the survey itself. Here, read the methodology from Lightfoot's website:

"
politicalcompass.org is a web site which asks a number of opinion questions of its visitors, and then places them in a two-dimensional space which is supposed to characterise their political views. Unfortunately, politicalcompass.org has a poor reputation; in particular, there is a suspicion that its questions are designed to make respondents lean towards an economically right-wing, socially liberal ("right libertarian") position, and the two axes of variation on which results are plotted are opaque in their derivation and may not be tremendously relevant.

These suspicions are compounded by the problem that politicalcompass.org's methods are not open and, therefore, it is not possible to determine whether their selection of questions carries a bias which its operators are using to further their own ends.

The purpose of this site is to do a survey of this type properly and openly, so that the methods and data in use are open to inspection.

The proper way to do this is to collect a bunch of questions and a bunch of answers to them, then take the space defined by all the answers to the questions, and construct a spanning basis for it. The natural way to do this is with principal components analysis, though as a non-statistician I can't comment on whether this is actually the best approach. We should then be able to discover -- in terms defined by the answers to the questions set -- the significant axes of variation in the data.

This means that all the results we get are defined by the data: we do not measure anyone's views according to criteria we set out, but according to endogenous criteria. The only points at which our judgment enters the method are

 * when choosing questions (or, rather propositions); and
 * when we give context to the results.

The first of those shouldn't matter, if the questions are reasonably unbiased and cover a wide enough range of subject materials. The second doesn't matter, since it's just a presentational issue.
" -- http://politics.beasts.org/rationale.shtml