Political Compass or Political Temperature

10 August 2021

Thoughts

Abstract

The political compass perhaps the most familiar model when it comes to discussing western political ideology. The model, while simple to grasp, has its critiques on how accurate of a model it really is. A lot of the criticism for the model evolves into more multi-dimensional models for capturing political ideology. Taking a note from Physics, instead of diving into the 3D case, I’d like to step back and dive deeper into the 2D case regardless if it accurately describes what we see. What happens if instead of thinking about the model as a means of capturing the ideology of an individual, and instead the means of approximating the ideology of a population? What if we think about the location on the politcal spectrum, not as a simple location in space, but rather more like the temperature value in a phase diagram?

If you’ve never had much exposure to Physics or Chemistry, it’s likely you’ve never been exposed to the fact that temperature is more complicated than a simple number that falls on a line. It’s likely you have some intuition about this though – it’s obvious that \( 90^{\circ} \text{F} \) \(\left(32^{\circ} \text{C}\right)\) with humidity is going to feel hotter than \( 90^{\circ} \text{F} \) of “dry heat”. The intuition here is that while the systems have the same temperature of \( 90^{\circ} \text{F} \), and that we can use that temperature to accurately describe both systems, we can’t consider these systems equivalent.

If you’ve been through high school chemistry, it’s likely that you would recognize the fact that \( PV = nRT \), but what exactly does that mean? An important thing to remember here is that \(n\) and \(R\) are constants, and so that means, if we choose to not think about the exact units of the equations, we can think of this relation like \(PV = T\). It’s common that we visualize on something known as a phase diagram, with pressure on one axis and volume on the other.

A comparison of the political compass and pressure v temperature plots

The striking thing about this phase diagram is the fact that if you move from one temperature value to the other in a system, the state of that system is dependent on how you navigate from one temperature to the other. This is concept known as path dependence. It’s this exact concept that is responsible for how annealing works.

Let’s now make an assumption that the political compass can at least describe a subset of political ideology, and that we measure the value against a collective instead of against an individual. If we start to think about the location of a population in this political spectrum, more like a location in political phase space, that even if the political temperature is a perfectly accurate model, two populations with the same political temperature can look completely different.

What would be more important in this system is not the current location in the phase space, but the path that was taken through the phase space over time. Think of how you can heat glass to a high heat if you do so slowly, but if you were to quickly change the temperature of your faucet from cold to hot, how easily glass breaks. It’s not the temperature of the system that determines if it breaks, but rather the dynamics of temperature.

How much do we even think about, let alone understand, what the implications of the political spectrum (of any number of dimensions) being a phase space? Does this model provide insights to the dynamics of revolutionary changes in a population’s political system? Does this model provide insights to how we should introduce change into a system in a way that preserves the stability of the system?

Going further, if we assume that this political temperature is geographically distributed, how does the spatial temperature distribution impact the system. Heating glass to a high degree in just a single location is enough to cause stress fractures throughout the system. How much can a system sustain being continually heated in one section, and continually cooled in another?

Even more complicated, what happens if we then introduce a mechanism to the system where the temperature of a single point in this geographic space is no longer primarily influenced by it’s neighboring points, but can change its own temperature based on trends it can now observe from a macro level? What happens if this mechanism realizes that it can make the most profit by maximizing the amount of time that it can expose points of one temperature to points of another?

This violent collision of large fronts of hot and cold air in the same physical location is the exact mechanism that forms tornadoes and hurricanes. At a system level, we understand rapid temperature changes to be violent and destructive. Even if the political compass dimensions don’t act as a phase space, just assuming that some portion of political ideology can exist on a phase space would open up the same line of questions.

Physically, we’ve always been able to understand the concept of temperature through spatial dependence – this spatial dependence allows us to give rise to diffusion. If we extended this to political temperature, we can work under the assumption that, eventually, and local changes in the temperature will eventually diffuse throughout the space. What if we’ve introduced a new term though, one that overpowers the diffusive term? In fluid dynamics, overpowering the diffusive term is what gives rise to turbulent flow.

Have we quietly allowed the introduction of a mechanism strong enough to overpower the natural diffusive mechanism of political temperature? If we have, have we created a system where political turbulence is now the operating norm? Could we do anything to minimize the influence of this mechanism – that by design, is responsible for the introduction of political turbulence? How do we navigate a system in a constant state of political turbulence?

This single thought experiment gives rise to a plethora of questions that feel particularly relevant in today’s political climate, but framed from a perspective I’ve never seen much consideration given to. It’s a thought experiment that has completely changed how I think about political interaction, and one that I wish had more exposure in political discussion. “Diffusing the political climate” is a phrase that we hear when talking about politics, maybe it’s time to start taking that phrase more literally.

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