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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jbe who wrote (68142)	12/22/1999 4:11:00 PM
From: nihil	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

Any binary assignment of politics is excessively reductionist as you point out. If one questions people about political views with 20 well chosen scalable questions, one obtains answers in 20 dimensions. If the questions are not well chosen (multicollinearity) one obtain less than 20 significant dimensions. Using a technique like factor analysis or multidimensional scaling, one may be able to extract a few highly signicant factors (linear combiations of the 20 dimensions or variables) but it is absurd to expect that one can extract all of the variation with a single factor ("Right-Left orientation") Nevertheless, I expect RLO will usually be the major factor, associated with perhaps 20 per cent of the total variance. The next most significant factor might well be "Authoritarian-Libertarian" and a third might be "Individualism-Collectivism" or "Risk Avoidance." Hofstede, in his groundbreaking study of personality and nationality, found four factors (later increased to five) to explain social attitudes 1. Individualism-Collectivism; 2. Fear of authority; 3. Uncertainty avoidance; and 4. Masculinity-Femininity (actually Hard-Soft), and 5. Confucian authoritarianism. Nothing very startling in this. US top on individualism, Japan on collectivism. Israel no respect for authority, Philippines fearful. China no risk avoidance. Sweden highly feminine (no spanking -- remember?).