One dimension:

Willingness to share Liberties with other people

Far Right = Ayn Rand

Far Left = some guy who just wants to live in a van down by the river and smoke weed all day

How many do you want it to have.

The political compass is a tool to illustrate and compare political preferences. The more dimensions you add the more complicated it becomes.

After 3 it gets tricky to draw anything useful. You can still choose which political values to illustrate.

If we are trying to avoid losing any information due to abstraction, I’d say at least somewhere in the low hundreds.

All actions are done out of desire and human desires are numerous and often contradictory even in the same person. Many people who think they are utilitarian likely still wouldn’t be okay with the Omelas structure of torturing a single kid even if that act allowed thousands of others to live painless lives.

Is it more right to avoid violence altogether, or is violence to prevent the slaughter of others better than doing nothing?

Morality is complicated and since morality dictates much of how we interact with others, it is likely the most significant factor in politics.

The second most would be personal desires. People with weak or localized empathy don’t tend to care about any politics that doesn’t affect them or their desires directly. Since desires are also diverse, this is multidimensional too.

Now, that being said, if our goal is to reduce the dimensionality as much as possible… the answer is basically any number you want.

Data analysis techniques will let you reduce the dimensionality of n-dimensional data to whatever number you want. In fact using similar techniques to word embedding would likely be very effective even if you simply group people by how similar their views seem to be (no need for you to actually define dimensions)

If we assume that there are around as many important dimensions to politics as there are typical English words, then we can assume the number of dimensions needed for encoding a person’s politics without losing relationships would be about the same as a word embedding vector.

In typical LLMs this is anywhere from around 50-300 dimensions.

Honestly, now I’m really fucking curious. If you created a quiz with thousands of political/philosophical questions and then had a large enough number of people take the quiz, you could legitimately do this with an autoencoder and see how many hidden neurons (dimensions) you would need for a precise encoding.

You might not be able to tell what those dimensions represent, but it would be incredibly fascinating to be able to subtract political ideologies from one another like you can with word embeddings.

Like with good embeddings you can subtract “France” from “Paris” then add that to “Poland” and it will give you a vector very close to “Warsaw”

Imagine being able to map out political or philosophical ideologies like this! You could ask it how far away two ideologies are too, or ask it what the average between two ideologies is, etc.

I feel like that would be incredibly fascinating to mess around with AND like the average example it could give you an idea of gaps in our political spectrum, ideologies that don’t exist yet or haven’t been named. It could show you attractor points or clusters and give insight into inherent human nature.

Damn I want to make this.

https://youtu.be/UuopBeaUN24

/s

I found a study that may be helpful.
The project is called the Chapel Hill Expert Survey, which is being conducted by Gary Marks of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and others, and asks political experts in each country to evaluate the policy positions of major political parties in EU member states.

This survey interprets the multidimensional political conflict as stated in the question, and in the latest survey (Version 2025.1), it is measured by the following conflict terms:

Reference

Official

Project website

The 2024 Chapel Hill Expert Survey on political party positioning in Europe: Twenty-five years of party positional data - ScienceDirect

Unofficial

Introduction to the Chapel Hill Expert Survey – Blog d’Emilien Houard-Vial

経済・社会文化・グローバリゼーションー2020年の各国政党政治ー｜NIRA総合研究開発機構 (Article in Japanese)

I’d say a 3D one is good for most cases. Personal freedom, economic freedom, and political freedom, AKA the NationStates Non-Political compass.

Functionally, though, while it’s an easy visual I don’t necessarily know how useful political compasses are in general. One of my main gripes with the currently popular one is that it’s personal+economic freedom, and I don’t think there should be an economy at all[1]. I end up very lib left on it (something like -8,-8 or -9,-9) despite, again, not thinking economy is something that should even exist. Would that lean me more right on the economy, or left? Who’s to say! You’re not economically free if there is none, but also you’re as economically free as you want to be!

1: My political ideals are not how I vote, so I go as close as I functionally can.

People are inventing new terms constantly to politically differentiate themselves from the neighbour every time they disagree on any detail.

That compass could have as many dimensions as words and meanings are in a dictionary. It’s like every fucking thing must be perfectly categorised, distinguished and segregated.

IMHO is more like a political 3D spectrum between globalism and nationalism.

How about something about supporting the people who are poor, unemployed, or sick? Socialists and leftists love it, while right-wing capitalists hate it. I don’t know how to phrase it concisely like you did.

And then there’s also the classic socialist-capitalist debate about worker rights. So employee rights could be another axis. Should the owner just exploit the workers or do the workers get to have weekends off, 8 h workdays, various vacations, safe working environment, fair wages etc.

Oh, and then there are various language based divisions too. There are entire parties dedicated to supporting specific language groups, but I guess you could summarize it as “support of minority language groups”. How about just lumping all minority groups into a single axis? How about something like: minority rights vs. majority? Nowadays, that includes sexual and gender minorities too.

How about city vs. rural life? Not too many decades ago, farming was a big part of life, so there were also many farmers who voted. Hence, we had farmer parties, and we still do to some extent. Now that farming is mostly automated, not that many voters care about farming. It’s just another industry, just like steel, paper or electronics. Historically speaking, city. vs rural life was definitely a political axis. Nowadays, not so much.

In any case, it’s a really complicated topic, so we’re going to need a lot of dimensions. Your suggestions are a good start. Just add a few more, and eventually you have enough. If you’re really technical about it, each and every question is a new dimension, but if you should group them together into broader topics. That way, you’re definitely going to end up in at least 20 dimensions.

politics is 1-dimensional thought. thats why its palatable to the lowest common denominators, its all based on FEAR and emotions.