Fifteen minutes, a wifi connection, and the willingness to confront your beliefs. Taking a fifty question quiz may be one of the most powerful civic acts, and one of the most honest conversations about your politics that you have.  

Young Forwardists Director of Media, Ailin Chen, and I sat down with Liam Petry, founder of the online quiz Find My Politics to answer the simple question: what made him build it?

The quiz offers 30-, 50-, and 80-question versions, testing either your general global political compass or, more narrowly, your U.S. politics. After rating your beliefs on economics, system trust, and more, you receive your result: matches from 17 defined ideologies and explanations why.

Liam Petry began our conversation by recounting his upbringing and its influence on his current project. Petry grew up in New York City, and “felt like I was stuck in a political bubble. Every piece of political discourse I heard presented the same set of points of view.” Petry said that it took attending the School of Ethics and Global Leadership to expose him to a more diverse environment of viewpoints. He described the school as “an environment where every single person came from a completely different background; it was incredibly eye-opening.” And as a result of this experience, Petry wanted to test his understanding of his own politics further.

Petry was inspired to create a tool that could provide more nuanced and diverse viewpoints to conversations about politics. A tool such as an identification quiz. At the time, tests that match users with ideologies already existed, like the The Political Compass test. But Petry explains that these earlier tests are, “20 years old, lacks sufficient nuance with only two axes, and…tends to bias users toward combining or conflating economically left and socially libertarian results.”

So he decided to build his own.

Petry was guided by one core principle: that the quiz should not “guide” users toward any sweeping conclusions. He began the development process by analyzing questions from existing tests, looking for issues such as leading wording — phrasing that suggests particular answers to users. From there, he wrote new, unbiased questions cross checking them with political professors at accredited American Universities such as Georgetown, Columbia, etc. Through that process of trial and cross-referencing came Petry’s five-axis model for political identification. Petry asserts that the five-axes model is superior over the more commonly used and original two-axes model because “the two-axes model assumes your economic views and your social views are the only two things that matter…Findmypolitics.com having 5 axes means that two people can want the same economic policy and still be completely different politically, something that wasn’t entirely possible on the original test.” 

A tool like Find My Politics is especially relevant in the current political landscape. As Petry observes, the “rabbitholes” or pipelines from social media algorithms can push people to align with one political group simply because a few of the group’s beliefs resonate with them. Find My Politics is designed to counter that by prompting self-discovery rather than tribalism. 

Take, for example, someone who grew up in a more right leaning area and takes the quiz expecting to land squarely on the right. Instead, their results might reveal something more moderate such as right leaning on traditional social values, but left-leaning fiscally. Two things can be true at once, and they do not need to strictly conform to a single party identity. Moments like that, Petry suggests, are both self-discovery and political education. 

This revelation is exactly what Find My Politics quiz is built to produce. It aims to bridge divisions by connecting people on the basis of shared political ideology, rather than under the broad labels of left and right as mass media commonly pushes. Petry has high hopes for the quiz’s future impact. While he admits that it hasn’t yet reached a scale to influence the two-party system directly, he sees every quiz result as a step closer to that goal.

He also has no intention of letting the quiz stay static. Petry continuously compares initial self-identification to final results, a process that allows Petry to catch and fix skewed questions. He’s equally focused on keeping the quiz current, updating it to reflect major global events from the September 11 attacks to the Iraq War to the ongoing conflicts involving Russia, Ukraine, and Israel. In fact, the absence of these events in the original Political Compass test was itself part of what inspired Petry to build something new.

Toward the end of our conversation, Chen and I asked whether a tool like this could have a place in the classroom, as a way to promote early civic education. Petry thinks the idea holds promise, but emphasizes that teachers should be upfront with the students that no test is perfect. Even more important, he said, is teaching students to see surprising results as an opportunity for education and introspection.