Libertarian, Authoritarian and the Vertical Axis Explained

The addition of a second, vertical axis to political self-assessment was a genuine improvement. It was also the source of the field’s most persistent misunderstanding, because of the two words usually printed at its ends.

Libertarian at the bottom, authoritarian at the top. One of those words is a compliment in most rooms and the other is close to an insult. As soon as a measurement scale has a good end and a bad end, it stops measuring and starts inviting performance. So it is worth being precise about what this axis actually asks.

The trade-off underneath it

The vertical axis measures a single disposition: where your instinct goes when individual freedom and coordinated order pull in opposite directions.

Not whether you like freedom. Everyone says they like freedom. The question is what you reach for first, before the specifics arrive, when the two genuinely cannot both be maximised.

That conflict is not hypothetical or rare — it is the structure of most hard collective decisions. A rule that reduces a shared risk restricts somebody’s choices. A protection that guarantees somebody’s autonomy removes a lever the group might have wanted. There is no arrangement in which both are at maximum, which is precisely why a disposition about the trade-off exists at all. If it were free, nobody would need an instinct about it.

We call our version of this axis state, running from personal liberty at one pole to collective authority at the other. The renaming is deliberate. It keeps the attention on what is being traded rather than on which word you would prefer to be described by.

Both poles have a serious case

Here is the part that gets lost. This is not a scale from enlightenment to menace. It is a scale between two positions that each hold something the other risks losing.

The liberty pole rests on a claim about knowledge and error. No central body can hold enough information about individual circumstances to make good decisions on their behalf at scale, and every coordinating body eventually optimises for its own continuation. So you should distribute decisions as widely as possible, accept the messiness that follows, and treat any constraint as something that must justify itself before it is imposed. The cost this pole accepts: some coordination problems will go unsolved, and some of them are the expensive kind.

The authority pole rests on a claim about interdependence. A great many outcomes people genuinely want are only achievable together, and “together” requires that someone can bind the group, including the members who would defect. Shared risks do not respect individual opt-outs. So there must be real capacity to decide collectively and make the decision stick. The cost this pole accepts: that capacity can be turned to bad ends, and it is much easier to build than to dismantle.

Both of those are adult positions. Both are held by serious people. The reason we score it as a continuum rather than a verdict is that essentially nobody sits at either extreme once the specifics are on the table — almost everyone accepts some binding constraints and defends some inviolable space. What differs, and what the axis measures, is the default: which way you lean before you know the details.

Why this axis is not the economic axis

The most common confusion is collapsing this axis into the economic one, on the assumption that favouring shared provision implies favouring state power, and favouring markets implies favouring personal liberty.

Neither implication holds. You can favour extensive shared provision and simultaneously hold a strong liberty-first instinct on speech, movement, privacy and personal conduct — the position is coherent and widely held. You can equally favour open markets while holding a strong order-first instinct on security, civic obligation and enforcement.

These really are two questions: who coordinates economic life, and how much can any collective body bind an individual. Keeping them apart is the entire justification for the second axis. Merging them, as the single left-right line does, is the failure that axis was introduced to fix.

Where two axes still are not enough

Two axes are better than one, and still insufficient — which is why our test scores four.

The vertical axis has a habit of absorbing things that do not belong to it. Two in particular:

Social continuity. Your posture toward inherited arrangements — preserve unless shown a reason to change, or revise unless shown a reason to keep — is a distinct disposition. It correlates loosely with the authority axis and comes apart from it constantly. Someone can hold a strong liberty-first instinct about state power while being deeply preserving about social convention, and the reverse is equally common. On a two-axis model those people are indistinguishable from each other on the vertical. We score continuity separately as the social axis.

The scope of obligation. How wide is the circle whose interests weigh on you automatically — household, community, nation, everyone? This has no natural home on a liberty–authority scale, but it does enormous work in how people actually reason about hard questions. It is our world axis, and it regularly turns out to be the dimension on which someone is most surprised by their own result.

Split those out and the vertical axis gets to be about the thing it was always about. Leave them in, and it becomes a bin for whatever the other axis could not hold. The general version of this argument — assumed dimensions versus discovered ones — is in compass versus typology.

Measuring it without the word problem

Because one pole of this axis carries a loaded name, it is unusually vulnerable to a specific distortion: people answer as the kind of person they would like to be seen as, rather than as themselves. Two design choices push back.

The statements never use either label. They describe concrete trade-offs at the level of principle — whether a shared risk justifies a constraint, whether a rule is better than persuasion, whether an exception should be available and who decides. Nobody has to identify with a word to answer.

Roughly half are reverse-keyed. On this axis in particular, agreement-shaped statements about freedom are extremely easy to agree with. If every item ran the same direction, the axis would measure how appealing the word “freedom” is in a sentence — which is to say, it would measure nothing. With half the items flipped, that pull operates in both directions and largely cancels. The mechanics are set out in the methodology.

Reading your own vertical score

Three questions make the number useful rather than decorative.

Which constraint do you already accept? If you scored toward liberty, name a binding rule you think is correct. Almost everyone has several. Their existence tells you where your real threshold sits, which is more informative than the direction of your lean.

Which freedom would you not trade? If you scored toward authority, name something you would refuse to give up regardless of what it bought the group. That is the boundary your score is measuring the distance to.

What moved you last? The vertical axis responds to circumstance more than people expect — perceived threat pulls almost everyone toward the order pole, and a period of stability lets them drift back. A score is a reading taken on a particular day by a particular nervous system. Why that is, and which parts of your profile are more durable than others, is covered in how political personality forms.