The academic William Clifton van der Linden says that the Political Compass uses a method called dimensionality reduction to try to make its results more dependable.

Van der Linden uses scholarly sources to support his analysis of the reliability of Voter Advice Applications, such as the Political Compass.

He finds Hillary Clinton's classification as right-leaning on economic policy and Donald Trump being ranked as more authoritarian than Robert Mugabe, Mao Zedong, and Fidel Castro to be nonsensical.

[11] Author Brian Patrick Michell takes issue with the positioning of ideologies and the framing of economic freedom on the horizontal axis.

[12] British journalist Tom Utley criticizes the phrasing of some questions on the test, finding them irritating and difficult to answer accurately.

Additionally, comparable charts were presented in Albert Meltzer and Stuart Christie's "The Floodgates of Anarchy" in 1970,[15] and in the Rampart Journal of Individualist Thought by Maurice C. Bryson and William R. McDill in 1968.

[17]: 8  In June 2022, the subreddit was used in a study by researchers at Monash University to predict users' political ideologies based on their digital footprints.