Political Alignment Test
This page is a simple explanation of the potential ways one could have alternatively defined the 3 axes used here.
Authoritarian vs Anarchist/Libertarian:
(Obedience) vs (Freedom)
Authoritarianism and libertarianism could alternatively have been used to describe the degree of freedom a government allows. This would however fully entangle cultural issues with the governance axis, thereby conflating every possible form of government and socio-cultural stance into a very oversimplified axis. It would be more appropriate to use libertarianism here than anarchism due to dealing with degree of liberty rather than hierarchy.
(Intervention) vs (Non-Intervention)
Authoritarianism and anarchism could alternatively have been used to describe the dichotomy between governance that is more complex/far-reaching/impactful and the opposite in which governance is simplified/minimized/unimpactful or just completely absent. Though realistically it is relatively impossible to combine non-governance with certain economic/social ideologies that require authority-based interventions so this definition of anarchism/libertarianism has some problems when combined with other dimensions. It also ignores the paradox of freedom in preference for non-interventionism.
Socialist vs Capitalist:
I suppose someone could define economic left vs right as something other than some variety of socialism vs capitalism, though other than the occasional use of communism (a subtype of socialism) instead of socialism I haven't seen anything worth considering.
(Collective Ownership) vs (Private Ownership)
This could alternatively have been used to describe a distinction between collective ownership and private ownership. Though last I checked capitalism by necessity allows multiple people to share ownership of property, allows public ownership, allows collective ownership, etc. And socialism can also allow collective ownership, common ownership, public ownership, etc. So to say that capitalism only involves private ownership or that socialism only involves collective ownership is simply untrue. This definition fails to place many scenarios such as: voluntary public ownership (public companies), voluntary government exchanges, government ownership, voluntary collective ownership, involuntary private ownership, etc. It isn't a mutually exclusive distinction nor does it encompass all forms of property. It also doesn't consider how exchanges are handled.
(Non-Private Means of Production) vs (Private Means of Production)
A more rigid and generalizable definition for capitalism and socialism is that socialism is any of the same things as capitalism, except it prohibits private ownership of the means of production. This alternative definition is much more accepted to the actual definitions of each, but it fails to distinguish between socialism and capitalism in much of any meaningful way since it still doesn't distinguish how the entire rest of economics are handled beyond whether or not private ownership is allowed over the means of production, yet some people insist that this is how the economic axis should be defined. For example, in a capitalist system, if a company goes public and the entire populace of a country happens to choose to buy a share of ownership of it, this would now be both collective property and private property, the only difference between this and socialism is that capitalism allows such ownership to be voluntary, any of the owners sharing that collective property would be allowed to sell ownership to someone willing to buy it, thus it is only voluntarily collective property, whereas under socialism private ownership is prohibited, no one is allowed to refuse to share ownership of that collective property to create a situation where it only has one owner, people are forced to share ownership of it. To give another example of how non-private vs private ownership is a terrible axis definition, do you agree that mandatory welfare should be on the left whereas voluntary charity should be on the right? Under the non-private vs private ownership definition a capitalist country could privatize welfare by having private businesses sell welfare, the government could then make not enrolling in private welfare illegal. The end result would be fully privatized and mandatory welfare for all citizens. This definition would say that such mandatory welfare is purely capitalist despite it being unsubstantially different from socialized welfare. Clearly the question of whether or not a private owner is involved fails to provide any meaningful distinction along an economic axis. It makes far more sense to look at something more specific than just capitalism and socialism in general to find a more meaningful distinction between specific subtypes, such as how our economic axis looks at planned economy socialism vs free market capitalism.
(Equality) vs (Greed)
This could alternatively have been used to describe the dichotomy between an economy based on equality and an economy based on greed. Though equality can take many forms and capitalism can include equality of opportunity despite excluding equality of outcome. So you would really need to disambiguate equality of what, which would presumably be equality of outcome for economic socialism. That said capitalism is not the opposite of equality so this metric isn't really a perfect dichotomy. Really no part of capitalism precludes people from engaging in voluntary charity, so the use of greed incorrectly throws any voluntary altruism into socialism, despite it being capitalist by necessity as capitalism allows people to do with their property as they want, including being altruistic with it.
(Intervention) vs (Non-Intervention)
This could alternatively have been used to describe degree of government intervention in the economy, thus contrasting interventionism of laws restricting economic freedoms to non-interventionism of no laws restricting economic freedoms (thus not caring about the economy itself, but whether or not the government intervenes in it, thereby ignoring the paradox of freedom). However, this would in effect take our economic dimension and fold the two extremes together to conflate restrictions that support economic freedom by opposing economic coercion with restrictions that discourage economic freedom, while putting our center on the new edge as letting everyone do whatever they want. Such a metric would be valid, but it would also heavily restrict the wide range of economic ideology found in our dimension, changing it into a much more narrow range with much less distinguishing usefulness and much less real world application, thus we opted for a much more widely applicable economic metric which more aptly contrasts degrees of economic freedom/coercion.
(Non-Market) vs (Market)
This could alternatively have been used to describe the dichotomy between a market or non-market based economy. This is similar to the metric we've actually used on this site, however it doesn't really describe anything more detailed beyond anything market based and anything without a market, so while it generally should be interpreted to require zero coercion to truly be a market economy, it could also be interpreted that any market no matter how coercive should be just as capitalistic hence the main difference between this alternative and our chosen definition is that we utilized free market capitalism rather than just capitalism which is always a market economy.
Progressive/Futurist vs Regressive/Conservative/Traditionalist/Primalist:
(Change) vs (Maintain) or (Progress) vs (Regress)
This is a very arbitrary and subjective metric in which the person making the test gets to decide what qualifies as change towards the future and what qualifies as the status quo or regressing. It is a rather useless distinction because different groups can have different norms and thus what is maintaining for one group can be change for another and what the test maker arbitrarily considers progress may be regression for another group. The core issue is that policy can progress towards anything while policy can alternatively be maintained at what others would consider progressive. Thus there is no objective metric as everything considered is purely relative to each subject at best and entirely subjective to the test maker's views at worst. The distinction between what qualifies as "progress" and what qualifies as "regression" is almost entirely determined by the subjective opinion of the test maker.
Amoralist/Rationalist/Empiricist vs Moralist:
(Secular) vs (Religious) or (Fact) vs (Belief)
This could alternatively have been used to describe how moralistic a culture should be. Naturally as with all political policies you don't get to decide how people naturally are, you can only let people be how they are or utilize some form of authority-based intervention to have them behave some other way, so this dimension isn't gauging how moralistic you are, but gauging how moralistic you think people should be caused to be by interventions for or against morality or by no interventions (centrist). If you did want to gauge how moralistic you are, then that would be a personality test, not a political test. Anyway, this metric has some potential issues when considering that morality is entirely subjective (moral relativism), thus it's very difficult to consider a secular vs religious metric since atheism and the like are still just another religious theism. Subjective moral beliefs of the test maker would tend to be the basis for distinguishing what qualifies as moralist and what qualifies as secular/amoralist. The alternative of factuality vs belief tends to get around that subjective issue, though fact in itself can be a difficult issue to prove with certainty or at least to prove to some people. There is the complicating perspective that nothing can be known (nihilism). Ultimately one could argue that factuality is just another metric of belief for whether you hold something to be true, as just because evidence suggests it to be fact, does not mean that it could not be later convincingly proved to be false. Though perhaps a metric of how people arrive at their beliefs with evidence-based rationality vs faith-based belief would be a valid metric and we can avoid the issues of whether or not something is fact/true/correct. Either way it's a relatively narrow and singular issue that really only concerns a small portion of cultural variability, so I don't think it would be worth using as the cultural axis for a broad 3 axis political test.
Individualist vs Collectivist:
(Self-Reliant) vs (Group-Reliant)
This could alternatively have been used to describe how reliant on each other a culture should be made to be. Though it's a bit of an unusual metric when solely considering culture and excluding economics. Within the variation of cultural politics it has barely any real world relevance. I suppose I could point to a few authority-based interventions like group-reliance in the legal-guardian relationships over minors with parents and offspring and other commonly mandated familial ties like inheritance. Though there isn't much variation in familial reliance mandates since it's a relatively natural consequence of offspring not immediately being able to be self-reliant. It's just not all that useful for the cultural axis.
Egoist vs Altruist:
(Selfish/Greed) vs (Selfless/Equality)
This could alternatively have been used to describe how greed-driven a culture should be made to be. Again when excluding economics it has relatively limited usefulness. In fact it's pretty much just a different perspective for measuring the same thing as the preceding metric.
Multiculturalist vs Monoculturalist:
(Inclusion) vs (Exclusion)
This could alternatively have been used to describe how cultural diversity should be integrated. Though between all the different possibilities: inclusion, assimilation, exclusion, segregation, integration, and additionally polyculturalism, transculturalism, etc. it is difficult to make this a broad dichotomy. The conformity metric we use instead measures almost the same thing but does so with a simplified dichotomy that more directly measures degree of cultural conformity rather than the multidimensional intricacies of how diversity is integrated.