Any political quiz can cite the literature. The question worth asking is whether this one holds up on its own data. This page is limited to what we can show: how the four dimensions behave across 5,737 results, how often a result agrees with how the person describes themselves, and the places where the instrument has fallen short. How the Scan is built and scored lives on how DNA Scan works; the reading list is at the end.
What the Scan claims
The DNA Scan makes three claims that can be checked. That political identity has four distinct dimensions — personal liberty, economics, national versus global, and culture — rather than one or two. That 32 statements are enough to place a person on them. And that the strain it returns describes the person who gets it. Each has a section below. The mechanism itself — 24 mapping items and 8 discriminators, distance scoring against 32 reference patterns, confidence tiers — is explained on how DNA Scan works and is not repeated here.
Are four dimensions real?
If the four dimensions were one thing measured four ways, their scores would move together. Here is how they actually move, across every quality-filtered result to date (N = 5,737). Each cell is the correlation between two axis scores: 0 means knowing one tells you nothing about the other; 1 would mean they are the same measurement.
| Axis | LibertyLib | EconomyEcon | NationNat | CultureCult |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Liberty | — | 0.00 | 0.22 | 0.32 |
| Economy | 0.00 | — | −0.54 | −0.54 |
| Nation | 0.22 | −0.54 | — | 0.70 |
| Culture | 0.32 | −0.54 | 0.70 | — |
- Liberty and economy: 0.00. Independent. How much you want the state out of private life says nothing about how much you want it out of the market. This is the observation the Nolan chart was built on, and our data reproduces it almost exactly.
- Economy against nation and culture: −0.54 and −0.54. The familiar left–right bundle: market views travel with national and traditional views. But they share under a third of their variance, which is why the bundle breaks for so many people — and why a single line misplaces them.
- Nation and culture: 0.70. The strongest pair, and the honest weak point. Nearly half their variance is shared; a critic could call them one and a half dimensions, and the AI study found the same on machine answers (0.73). We keep them separate because the cases where they part — cosmopolitan traditionalists, secular nationalists — are exactly what a merged axis would erase, and they are common enough to fill several strains.
Does the result fit?
A model can be well-grounded in research and still miss you. There is no external ground truth for a political identity, so we do not publish an “accuracy” figure. We run two checks that can be stated honestly: whether the result feels right to the person who gets it, and whether it matches the strain they would have chosen for themselves.
How these are computed: the results count excludes 550 submissions the instrument itself flagged for straight-lining or speeding; the ratings are every answer on the current scale, unfiltered. Raters are self-selected — people who answer are not a random sample of everyone who sees a result — so read the percentages as indicative. Figures as of 2026-10-12, refreshed at most daily.
- 39%ranked their actual result firstchance level 6%
- 63%had it in their top threeof 32 strains
- 58%picked a strain in the same familychance level 18%
scripts/scan-evidence-stats.ts. What has not held up
Publishing the misses is the part that makes the rest believable. These are the places the instrument has fallen short, in our own data, and what happened next.
- Nation and culture travel together. r = 0.70 on people, 0.73 on machines. Two of the four dimensions are less independent than the framing suggests. We keep them apart for the reasons above, and we say so here rather than round the framing up.
- The strain labels barely worked on machine answers. In September 2026 we gave the same 32 statements to 31 AI models, 5 to 30 times each. The four axis scores held; the 32-way classification largely did not. The whole study is published, including that. Read what held up and what did not.
- One strain fits worst. Rooted Progressive is among the most common results and has had the lowest fit rating of any strain across two versions of its description. It is being rewritten, and the fit scale is what surfaced it.
- A catch-all, fixed. The previous scoring version (v2.0) sent about 11% of takers to a single centrist strain, a sign the scoring could not decide. Version 2.1 rewrote the discriminator items; the share is now about 4.5%, with all 32 strains reached. Recorded here because it is the pattern: the fit data finds the problem, the next version fixes it.
- Raters and self-identifiers are self-selected, and there is no external ground truth. Every fit figure on this page is an upper bound on the population of people who see a result.
The moral foundations layer
The DNA Scan measures where you land politically. DNA Origins measures why — the moral intuitions upstream of your positions. Its framework adapts Moral Foundations Theory, the research program of Jonathan Haidt, Jesse Graham, and colleagues showing that political differences track a small set of moral intuitions that people weigh differently: care for the vulnerable, fairness, loyalty to the group, respect for authority, and a sense of the sacred.
We score seven foundations rather than the original five, following two well-documented refinements: fairness splits into Equality (no one treated as lesser) and Proportionality (reward should track contribution), which pull in opposite political directions; and Liberty — resentment of domination and coercion — is scored as its own foundation, following the research on libertarian moral psychology (Iyer and colleagues, 2012). The result named by your leading foundation is your moral type; a plain-language walk-through of the instrument lives at how DNA Origins works.
The item bank carries several safeguards: every foundation competes in exactly four trade-offs on a balanced pairing graph; each foundation appears twice on each side of the slider, so lateral response habits cancel instead of accumulating; question order is randomized per session; sliders must be touched before advancing, so an untouched midpoint can never be silently recorded; and each submission carries engagement flags (speed, completion) that exclude low-quality responses from research analysis.
The suite also measures institutional trust — how far you extend good faith to government, business, and civil society, each probed by a balanced pair of statements. It lives in DNA Dynamics, the temperament leg of the suite, and is deliberately reported as context, never folded into a moral type or moral-route verdict: it doesn’t change those results. We measure it because trust direction — which institutions get your benefit of the doubt — often decides which solutions feel safe to a person long after their values are set, and because it is measurably distinct from the foundations themselves.
What we drew on
The four-dimensional design is not our invention; it is where the research on ideology has been pointing for two decades. The full references are at the foot of the page.
Ideology has more than one dimension. Factor analyses of political attitudes consistently separate economic views (taxes, regulation, redistribution) from social views (religion, gender, tradition), and find that the two have different roots. Feldman and Johnston (2014) and Treier and Hillygus (2009) are the standard references; the correlation table above is our own replication.
A unidimensional model of ideology provides an incomplete basis for the study of political ideology. Two dimensions — economic and social ideology — are the minimum needed to account for domestic policy preferences. More importantly, the determinants of these two ideological dimensions are vastly different. Feldman & Johnston, Political Psychology, 2014
Globalization is its own cleavage. Kriesi and colleagues (2006) showed that attitudes to open borders, trade and supranational institutions divide electorates along a line that cuts across left and right; Hooghe and Marks’ GAL–TAN work reaches the same conclusion for European parties. That is the source of our national-versus-global axis, and the reason it is scored apart from culture even though the two correlate.
Most people are not ideologues. Converse (1964) found that ordinary citizens rarely hold the tightly structured belief systems that elites do, and Kinder and Kalmoe (2017) confirmed it for the modern electorate. The practical consequence for a quiz is that mixed profiles are the norm, not the exception, and a good instrument has to give them somewhere to land rather than force them to a pole.
Intuitions come first. Haidt and colleagues’ work on moral foundations shows that political positions track a small set of moral intuitions people weigh differently. It underlies DNA Origins, described above, and it is why the suite separates where you stand from why.
Frequently asked questions
Is the DNA Scan accurate?
There is no external ground truth for a political identity, so we do not publish an accuracy figure. We publish what we can measure: 88% of raters say their result describes them; 39% of people who rank the strains themselves put their actual result first, against a chance level of 6%; and the four dimensions are distinct at the level of scores, with one pair (nation and culture) more related than we would like. All of it is above, with the caveats.
Are the four dimensions really independent?
Three of the six pairs are close to it. Liberty and economy are uncorrelated (0.00); liberty is only weakly related to nation and culture. Economy correlates with nation and culture at about −0.54, the familiar left–right bundle. Nation and culture correlate at 0.70, which is the one pair a critic can fairly question. We keep them separate because the people on whom they diverge are common and would otherwise be misplaced.
Why not just left and right?
Because the best single line through our data captures 62.1% of the variation between respondents and misses the rest. That is not a small remainder: it is the difference between a libertarian and a traditionalist who both sit “on the right,” or a cosmopolitan and a labor populist who both sit “on the left.”
How do you measure whether a result fits?
Two ways. Everyone is asked, after their result, how well it describes them, on a four-point scale with two positive and two negative answers. A smaller group then ranks the strains they believe are really theirs, and we compare the ranking to the result they got, against what agreement would look like by chance. Both groups are self-selected, so the figures are upper bounds.
How does PoliticalDNA relate to academic research?
The four-dimensional model draws on established work on multidimensional ideology (Feldman and Johnston; Treier and Hillygus), the globalization cleavage (Kriesi and colleagues), the GAL–TAN framework from European politics research (Hooghe and Marks), and Moral Foundations Theory (Haidt, Graham and colleagues). The instrument itself is ours, and this page reports how it performs on our own data.
How does PoliticalDNA relate to the World’s Smallest Political Quiz?
PoliticalDNA was created by the same person who leads The Advocates for Self-Government, the organization behind the WSPQ — though it is an independent project, separate from that organization. The WSPQ is built on the Nolan Chart, a two-axis model with libertarian-movement origins; PoliticalDNA extends the core insight — that political identity has more than one dimension — while deliberately departing from that framing: four dimensions instead of two, thirty-two archetypes across eight families in which the libertarian family is one branch among many, and items calibrated so no family is the default destination.
Further reading
If you want to explore the research behind political psychology and ideology:
The Righteous Mind
The most accessible introduction to moral psychology and why we’re divided by politics. Essential reading for understanding how intuitions drive reasoning.
Neither Liberal nor Conservative
The modern case that most Americans are “ideologically innocent” — their views don’t fit the categories elites use.
Predisposed
Explores the biological and psychological roots of political differences — why liberals and conservatives seem to experience the world differently.
Open versus Closed
How personality — especially openness to experience — shapes political identity in the modern era.
The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion
A foundational text on how people form and change political opinions based on information flow and predispositions.
Democracy for Realists
A challenging but important book on how citizens actually make political decisions — spoiler: it’s not primarily through rational issue evaluation.
Academic references
Multidimensional ideology
- Feldman, S., & Johnston, C. (2014). Understanding the determinants of political ideology: Implications of structural complexity. Political Psychology, 35(3), 337–358.
- Treier, S., & Hillygus, D. S. (2009). The nature of political ideology in the contemporary electorate. Public Opinion Quarterly, 73(4), 679–703.
- Feldman, S. (2003). Values, ideology, and the structure of political attitudes. In D. O. Sears, L. Huddy, & R. Jervis (Eds.), Oxford Handbook of Political Psychology. Oxford University Press.
Globalization & new cleavages
- Kriesi, H., Grande, E., Lachat, R., Dolezal, M., Bornschier, S., & Frey, T. (2006). Globalization and the transformation of the national political space. European Journal of Political Research, 45(6), 921–956.
- Hooghe, L., Marks, G., & Wilson, C. J. (2002). Does left/right structure party positions on European integration? Comparative Political Studies, 35(8), 965–989.
Moral & political psychology
- Haidt, J. (2012). The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. Vintage Books.
- Graham, J., Haidt, J., & Nosek, B. A. (2009). Liberals and conservatives rely on different sets of moral foundations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 96(5), 1029–1046.
- Graham, J., Nosek, B. A., Haidt, J., Iyer, R., Koleva, S., & Ditto, P. H. (2011). Mapping the moral domain. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 101(2), 366–385.
- Iyer, R., Koleva, S., Graham, J., Ditto, P., & Haidt, J. (2012). Understanding libertarian morality: The psychological dispositions of self-identified libertarians. PLoS ONE, 7(8), e42366.
- Jost, J. T., Federico, C. M., & Napier, J. L. (2009). Political ideology: Its structure, functions, and elective affinities. Annual Review of Psychology, 60, 307–337.
- Mondak, J. J. (2010). Personality and the Foundations of Political Behavior. Cambridge University Press.
Belief systems & public opinion
- Converse, P. E. (1964). The nature of belief systems in mass publics. In D. Apter (Ed.), Ideology and Discontent. Free Press.
- Zaller, J. R. (1992). The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion. Cambridge University Press.
- Kinder, D. R., & Kalmoe, N. P. (2017). Neither Liberal nor Conservative: Ideological Innocence in the American Public. University of Chicago Press.
Values & voting
- Schwartz, S. H., Caprara, G. V., & Vecchione, M. (2010). Basic personal values, core political values, and voting. Political Psychology, 31(3), 421–452.