Nolan's graph
The Nolan graph is a political diagram created in 1969 by American politician David Nolan. The graph defines human political positions with respect to two coordinate vectors, economic opinion and personal opinion, to produce a kind of Cartesian system of political ideologies.
Nolan's graph expands the analysis of political opinions beyond the traditional political spectrum that measures politics along a one-dimensional left-right axis to a two-dimensional graph: degree of economic freedom and degree of personal freedom. According to Nolan, progressivism advocates only personal freedom, while conservatism only advocates economic freedom. His vision is based on the assumption that both freedoms can take place at the same time, without points of conflict, and that liberalism defends and exalts them simultaneously.
Nolan's graph places on the X axis the political position with respect to economic freedom and on the Y axis the political position with respect to personal freedom. It was created in 1971, with two axes (economic and political) perpendicular to each other. Often the graph is shown rotated 45 degrees, as in the case of the World’s Smallest Political Quiz. This graph shows economic freedom (tax, trade, and free enterprise) on its X-axis and personal freedom (drug legalization, abortion, military service) on the X-axis. Y axis. This puts leftists or progressives in the left quadrant, liberals on top, rightists or conservatives on the right, and statists or populists on the bottom. However, it does not consider the conflicts between personal and economic freedom that arise, for example, between corporate interests and those of the citizenry.
Development
A similar two-dimensional graphic, but with eight sections instead of four, appeared in the essay The Floodgates of Anarchy (1970) by Stuart Christie and Albert Meltzer. In Radicals for Capitalism (p. 321), Brian Doherty traces the origin of the graph idea to an article by Maurice Bryson and William McDill in The Rampart Journal of Individualist Thought (1968) titled "The Political Spectrum: A Two-Dimensional View".
David Nolan first published the current version of the graph in an article titled "Classifying and Analyzing Politico-Economic Systems" in the January 1971 issue of El Individualista (The Individualist), the monthly magazine of the Society for Individual Liberty (SIL). In December 1971, Nolan helped found the group that would become the Libertarian Party of the USA.
Frustrated with simplistic left-right analysis that restricted space for other ideologies, Nolan designed a two-axis chart that would become known as the Nolan Chart. The Nolan Chart is the centerpiece of the World's Shortest Political Test. Nolan's discovery was that the biggest difference between different political philosophies, that is, the really defining element of what a person believes politically, is the amount of control the rest of society (via government) has over human action., which defends said person.[citation needed] Nolan reasoned that almost all human action in politics can be divided into two generic categories: economic and personal. The economic category includes what people do as producers and consumers (what they buy, sell, produce, where they work, who they hire, and what they do with their money); examples of economic action are starting or operating a business, buying a house, constructing a building, working in an office or factory, etc. The personal category includes what people do in their relationships with other people, their self-expression, or what they do with their bodies and minds; examples of personal action are the choice of which books to read or which movies to watch, the choice of whom to marry, what food, medicine or drugs they consume, their recreational activities, their religious choices, the organizations with which they collaborate or with whom they decide associate.
Nolan realized that since most government activity and control occurs in these two categories, one can define a person's or political party's political position by how much government control in these two areas they advocate.. Thus, political ideologies can be described as:
- Anarchism: They advocate the total absence of government control over both economic action and personal action.
- Totalitarianism: they defend the absolute or almost absolute control of the government on both economic action and personal action.
- Conservativeism: they prefer less government control over economic action (e.g. a more free market), but more government intervention in personal action (e.g. anti-drug laws).
- Progressism (in the modern sense of the American term 'liberals') prefer less government control in personal action (e.g., voluntariness of military service), but greater government intervention and control in economic action (e.g., a minimum wage established by the government).
- Liberalism: They defend the freedom of people in their economic and personal action, that is, they oppose all or almost all kinds of government intervention or control in both categories of action. Liberals believe that people should be free to choose their economic actions (such as conservatives) and their personal actions (such as progressives).
- Communitarism: They defend considerable government control and intervention in both categories of action, both economic and personal. In the various versions of the graph, including the original version of Nolan, terms such as "comunitarism" or "populism" are used to label this corner of the graph.
To visualize his perspective, Nolan constructed a two-axis graph. One axis was for economic freedom and the other axis was for personal freedom with the axes ranging from 0% free (meaning full government control) to 100% free (no government control). 100% economic freedom means a free market; 100% personal freedom means complete absence of government control over personal affairs or relationships between people. Depending on the amounts of freedom that are defended in each of the axes, a person, a political organization or a political philosophy can be classified ideologically. Instead of ranking all political opinions on a one-dimensional axis from left to right, the Nolan Chart allows for a two-dimensional measure that separates different ideologies.
Nolan commented that when people saw his graph, they experienced an irreversible change: from that moment on, the person reflected his political orientation in two dimensions instead of in one dimension.
In 1987, Marshall Fritz, founder of Advocates for Home Rule, modified the chart and added ten questions to build what he called the World's Smallest Political Questionnaire to allow respondents to rank their political views on the Nolan Chart.
Positions
The Nolan graph in its original form has two dimensions with two perpendicular axes: a horizontal X-axis labeled economic freedom and a vertical Y-axis labeled personal freedom. It looks like a square divided into four sections, with a label assigned to each of the sections:
- Down left – Statism. Those who defend a low level of both economic and personal freedom. Nolan originally named this philosophy as populismbut later versions of the chart use the labels statistic, authoritarianism or totalitarianism.
- Above left – Left Ideologies. Those who defend a low level of economic freedom and a high level of personal liberty.
- Below right – Right Ideologies. Those who defend a high level of economic freedom and a low level of personal liberty.
- Right up – Liberalism. Those who defend a high level of both economic and personal freedom.
Surveys
In October 2010, a Gallup poll found five groups of Americans. This poll ranked Americans as "Morals first (17%), mostly religious; Keep it (the State) small (22%); The bigger the better (20%); Medium soft (17%); and Obama Progressives (24%), strongly Democrats, with the highest number of progressives".
In August 2011, the libertarian Reason Magazine and the organization Rupe surveyed 1,200 Americans by telephone and ranked the respondents' political views according to the Nolan Chart. The Reason-Rupe poll found that "Americans cannot be easily lumped into 'progressives' or 'conservatives'". Specifically, 28% expressed conservative views, 24% expressed liberal views, 20% expressed community views, and 28% expressed progressive views (within ±3% error).
Criticism
The American writer and political theorist Brian Michell has criticized Nolan's graph, explaining that politics can sometimes be difficult to divide between the personal and the economic—for example, in immigration—and because the definition of freedom of the libertarian liberals—the one represented in the graphic—is different from the definition of socioliberals.