PIS on the Web

Hehehe, is this the first time the PIS web site has received a link from a non-member's web site? That blog, The LEO Test, is an interesting academic project which might be of great interest to PIS members. It is run by a political science academic who is trying to build a model which can analyse the ideology of various political figures. While I thought the theory underpinning the model (read the posts linked under "about" on the site), I was sceptical about the ability of his method to accurately analyse people's position.

His method is basically a word search. He has three columns of words, one for each of what he sees as the major schools of political thought (liberty, equity and order). He simply runs representative text written by politicians or commentators through a program and grades the person by the percentage of L, E and O words which appear. Like I said, I was sceptical, but the results he's reported so far seem to be spot on. It's a blog to keep an eye on, I reckon.