Methodology
PoliQuiz is independent and not affiliated with any party, campaign, or PAC. Here's exactly how it works.
The questions
The core quiz has 20 statements: 15 national and 5 tied to your state's laws or recent ballot debates. The first 5 are free and cover every axis, so the early read you can share after them already means something. Statements are written so that agreeing is sometimes the left-leaning answer and sometimes the right-leaning one, which reduces the bias that comes from simply agreeing with everything. Every question links to a neutral background source.
After every 5 answers, the order of the remaining questions shifts so axes we know least about come up sooner, drawn from the full national pool. You always answer exactly 20.
After finishing the core quiz, you can take five 20-question Deep Dives on specific themes. Each one adds to your overall profile. Your overall stance combines every answer from the core quiz and any Deep Dives you've completed, so each Deep Dive sharpens the picture.
The four axes
- Economic: Free Market ↔ Interventionist
- How much government should shape markets, taxes, wages, and the safety net.
- Social / Cultural: Traditional ↔ Progressive
- Attitudes toward cultural change, family, identity, and social institutions.
- Authority: Libertarian ↔ Authoritarian
- How much power the state should have over individual behavior, speech, and security.
- Foreign Policy: Non-interventionist ↔ Internationalist
- How actively the U.S. should engage abroad through alliances, aid, trade, and military power.
Scoring
Answers map to +2 (strongly agree) through −2 (strongly disagree). Each question carries a weight between 0.5 and 1 on one or more axes. Your score on an axis is the sum of answer × weight, divided by the most it could have been, then scaled to −100…+100. “Not sure” answers are left out of both totals, so they never push you anywhere.
Red / blue / purple lean averages the economic and social axes, which best predict U.S. party identification. An average above +12 reads as blue, below −12 as red, and anything in between as purple.
Points are earned for answering, for streaks of decisive answers, for each block of 5, and for achievements. They never depend on which side you take.
Archetypes and platforms
We place 10 archetypes and 4 party platforms on the same four axes. These are editorial estimates based on each tradition's published positions. Match percentages measure distance in four-dimensional space. They aren't endorsements.
State comparisons
State voting patterns use certified presidential results from 2016, 2020, and 2024. The “takers in your state” figures come only from completed PoliQuiz results. They describe who took the quiz, not a scientific poll.