Here is my recommended song for this post.

So, after our departure from our last unit we have started moving towards another unit. We began by looking at political ideologies. I personally have never really looked into it, I’ve only agreed or disagreed to what politicians have said in elections. I knew the communism was left wing and fascism was right wing and that’s about it. So we began having a quiz every day, in different formats, that asked question about where political ideas are on the spectrum and what there stance is on economic ideals.

On top of those quizzes we did a series of lectures outlining some of the major social and economic ideologies. I found that really useful to put an idea behind words I’ve heard tossed around. What I found really interesting is how there is so much depth by way of ideologies. There is a huge variety of differing opinions of fundamental governing in so many different ways. I had never really processed that before so I was really intrigued by the huge amount of different ideologies involved in the political spectrum.

Along with the lectures we briefly went over the style of notes one can take during lectures (in prep for university). I had always just taken notes how my Biology teacher writes them and I just continue to use that format when needed. It closely compares to the standard style of note taking which I’m the most comfortable with. So during the lecture we had to pick a style and do all of our notes in that format. I chose the standard style as I’m comfortable with it but also as I think it’s the best way for me to interprète my notes. Having titles, subtitles and content underneath just makes sense for my brain. It’s how I’ve learned a lot in Biology and how I sort of operate.

So, after doing the lecture and having that slightly better understanding of the huge range of political ideologies we took two tests. The first being the Political spectrum test. It asked a series of questions around certain ideas and eventually placed me pretty close to the center. I was slightly left and libertarian (only a little bit). I thought that was pretty on par with my personal thinking. I’m definitely not someone who supports totalitarian ideas but I also am not super anarchist and libertarian in the sense of having utter freedom from government. I personally am not like a serious “I am a liberal” kind of person, I just side with the politics I agree with the most at the time.

After taking that test we took another one. This one was for the Canadian election last year and asked another series of questions but were geared towards youth and youth issues that have been brought up. It ranked us on a different spectrum that was just for the Canadian parties and was aligned differently. I ended up right in the mix of the Liberal, Conservative and Green parties. I found that test really useful to solidify where I thought I was amongst the parties in Canada. What was also really great is that they broke down each question and where each party stood compared to our own answers. That was really interested to help understand where those parties lie when it comes to some of the ideas that are close to home for me. The one thing that stood out to me from that was the stance that the conservatives take on things. It is very close to the PPC stand point and sort of the opposite of mine (in most cases). That was really in line with my placement on the first test as well so that was also good to know in comparison.

Now with the tests and lecture under our belt we were tasked with this blog post. We could take the baseline further and do a video advertising one specific ideology or we could make a poster highlighting the political spectrum with a unique take on it from our understanding. I’ve always been very interested in the role that colours plays in our perception of ideologies. In Canada Conservatives are blue, Liberals are red, Green Party is green and the NDP is orange, so growing up I’ve alway associated those ideas to those parties.

My real interest was in how those colours are perceived globally and if there are any generic colours that are used for a specific ideology. I wanted to recreate the political spectrum just with the flags/logos of political parties to see if there are any patterns within that. I first tried to find if there was already any association with politics and colours. Wikipedia outlined some of the general colours and parties using them but I found this other site that outlined a study done to assess the colour spectrum and people’s relation to the in a political sense. They went way too in depth for me, using the colour spectrum numerically to provide an exact range of light. It did help shine a general idea of what I was to expect while creating the poster. Red is commonly associated for left wing ideologies and mostly left wing- totalitarianism parties and governments. Blue is typically used for right wing – totalitarianism. That seems to be one of the truest patterns I found as well.

I collected flags and logos of various parties in Canada, history and some of the major countries in Europe, with a few Australian and New Zealand. For the actual placement on the spectrum I used the political spectrum site I took the first test on. They have charts of some of the extreme ideologies, past elections and some of the key other governments around the world. Here are just a few of the flags corresponding parties and their placement on the spectrum.

– Stalinist – Communist (USSR under Stalin control) Top Left

– Anarcho-Socialist movement Bottom Left

– Indian National Congress (Gandhi Leadership) Bottom Left

– Mussolini’s flag (flag of his office during his rule of Fascist Italy) Top Right

– UK Conservative Party (under Margret Thatcher leadership) Top Right

– Canadian Libertarian Party Bottom Right

– Green Party of Canada (2019 election) Center Right

– New Democratic Party of Canada (2019 election) Center Left

As I mentioned earlier the main pattern I observed is that Left-Wing (Communist, Socialist and Liberalist) parties typically use red in their logos and flags and Right-Wing (Conservatist, Fascist, Capitalist) parties are typically blue. On top of that most environmentalist parties are green (makes sense) and libertarian parties are commonly yellow or purple (at least among the examples I found). Of course that is not a set thing that all Left Wing parties have to use red but it is a commonality that can be seeded in traditional usage as well as continued perception in modern day. Due to the history in the US during the Cold War most North Americans will associate red (in the political sense) in a communist and socialist sense. Same goes for conservatism and blue. There are exceptions but the next time you look at a political parties colour scheme consider if their ideology relates to the general colour trend of the political spectrum.