Heather Roy

29 July 2020

What do media actually mean when they talk about people or parties as being “left”, “centre”, “right” or even “hard right”? History writes Genghis Khan up as someone occupying the hard right, as it does Hitler but they hardly represented the same ideology. Neither had anything in common with the modern day ACT party which is just about always described as hard right by our journalists.

The descriptors are an attempt at describing political ideology but in an amateur and misguided way. You may well ask why it’s important to get this right? The answer is that people should know who and what they are voting for.

TorquePoint presents our take on the political spectrum, updated from our 2017 version. In it we take a more comprehensive approach to capturing what political parties core beliefs are. Our Political Spectrum 2020 ‘VoterTorque’ podcast tells the story:

 

While we’ve got you in this ideology zone, it’s also important to know where each of us sits in the political spectrum so we vote for the candidate and party that best represents us. Most already think they know but we’re frequently surprised (and so are they!) when we run a simple exercise using a political compass to show people how their political beliefs match those of political parties and candidates. Our fourth ‘VoterTorque’ podcast is about the political compass:

 

Knowledge is power they say, and we like knowing we’ve helped people vote for those they really want in power.