Generally, I find one dimensional ways of describing people's beliefs have a value so close to zero, the difference doesn't matter. Two dimensional charts are exactly twice as valuable.
'Left' and 'right'; 'authoritarian' and 'libertarian'; 'conservative' and 'liberal' are all labels of convenience, rather than capturing much that's particularly substantial. By using small words to capture big differences, a lot gets lots.
The questionnaire was heavily US focused, picking issues that are important in the US and only marginal elsewhere (eg abortion) and, economically, focuses almost exclusively on another vague term 'big business'. For people from other countries, the issues that are important are quite different and would cause a very different location on these scales (eg I'm a kiwi: a far better indicator of economic attitudes relates to the use of subsidies to farmers).
As for all politicians being clustered close together - the only appropriate response is, "well, d'uh....". Barack Obama and John McCain were both trying to grab the same votes (those swing voters that actually decide the elections). And they both had teams of pollsters working out how to appeal to those voters - the appropriate policy positions to take and so forth. Plus they had already been successfully elected (to the Senate, then in their party primary), thus had obviously appealed to a large number of voters. So it's expected that their position is going to closely reflect the country's political positioning: putting yourself in the middle to appeal to as many people as possible. They put their own spin and twist on it, but the underlying policy is going to be very similar. The real difference between the two was rhetoric, not substance. The same was true in NZ in their recent elections (National won largely because Labour had been in power too long). The same is true of the current differences between Labour and the Tories.
Very rarely, you get a transformational politician, but they are very rare. Thatcher and Reagan did offer something radically different from their predecessors. But even the shift towards that particular brand of economic liberalism in the 80s (Thatcher, Reagan et al) was less about transformational politicians than politicians successfully reading, then riding a wave of change in the way the electorate was thinking.
Generally, most political analysis, particularly that in the mass media, is weak. It needs to be simple to retain mass appeal. Being simple makes it superficial: kicking out crude classifications which tell you nothing of value.
In reality, there are hundreds of issues that people get combined to make political positions. Most people care about a small set of these, and these are usually ones that have some direct impact on the individuals.
I would be more interested in looking at positions on particular families of issues (justice, taxation, international relations, protectionism, attitude to family) and looking at some more attitudinal measures (pragmatism/idealism, skill at negotiation etc). But these are too hard to get across in a 30 minute news bulletin.
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