Compare methods

	Moral Foundations Questionnaire	Political Ideology Scale
Field	Political Psychology	Political Psychology
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2011	1990
Originator	Jesse Graham, Jonathan Haidt et al.	Hans-Dieter Klingemann & Norberto Bobbio
Type	Self-report values inventory	Self-report
Seminal source	Graham, J., Nosek, B. A., Haidt, J., Iyer, R., Koleva, S., & Ditto, P. H. (2011). Mapping the moral domain. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 101(2), 366-385.	Fuchs, D., & Klingemann, H. D. (1990). The left-right schema. In M. Kent Jennings & Jan W. Van Deth (Eds.), Continuities in political action. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Aliases	MFQ, MFQ-30, Moral Foundations Theory Questionnaire	Left-Right Scale, Ideology Continuum, Political Spectrum Scale
Related	4	3
Summary	The Moral Foundations Questionnaire (MFQ) is a 30-item self-report instrument developed by Graham, Haidt and colleagues (2011) to measure the degree to which people rely on five intuitive moral foundations: Care/harm, Fairness/cheating, Loyalty/betrayal, Authority/subversion, and Sanctity/degradation. It is the standard operationalization of Moral Foundations Theory, which argues that political and cultural moral disagreements arise from differing weights placed on these foundations.	The Political Ideology Scale measures individual self-placement on a left-right political spectrum, capturing fundamental preferences for government role, economic organization, and social values. The single-item self-placement measure (most common) asks respondents to rate themselves on a 0-10 or 0-100 continuum; multi-item versions assess distinct ideological dimensions (economic policy, social policy, nationalism). The left-right axis remains the dominant organizing principle of political competition globally, predicting party choice, policy preferences, and electoral behavior despite critiques that it oversimplifies multidimensional political space.