Atlas / Codebook

How the scoring works

Every organisation in this atlas carries six scores, each running from −10 to +10. A number is worthless unless its scale is fixed, so each axis is anchored at five points with a description and with real cases that sit there. This is the technique the Chapel Hill expert surveys use to keep hundreds of separate coders on the same scale.

Zero means a genuine mixed or balanced position, not an absence of opinion. A score is a description of a stated position and a governing record; it is not a judgement of merit, and two organisations sitting close together can differ enormously in their consequences.

EC

Economic organisation

Score	What it means	Anchor cases
−10	All productive assets held in common or by the state; money and market allocation abolished or vestigial.	Khmer Rouge, anarcho-communism
−05	Large-scale redistribution and universal public services inside a mostly private, price-allocated economy.	Nordic social democracy, Die Linke
00	Genuine mixed economy, or a programme that subordinates ownership questions to something else entirely.	Italian Fascism, Deng-era China
+05	Market allocation is the default; the state corrects failures and funds a safety net but does not direct investment.	Christian democracy, Kuomintang
+10	Private property is near-absolute; taxation, regulation and public provision are treated as illegitimate in principle.	Anarcho-capitalism, La Libertad Avanza

CU

Social and cultural order

Score	What it means	Anchor cases
−10	Inherited norms carry no authority; equality across gender, sexuality, ethnicity and belief is the organising commitment.	Second-wave feminism, Green politics
−05	Broadly liberal on social questions with some deference to established institutions and gradual reform.	Social liberalism, PSOE
00	No settled cultural position, or a deliberate refusal to take one.	Five Star Movement, mutualism
+05	Tradition, family and national culture treated as goods worth defending in law, without excluding dissent.	Christian democracy, Social Catholicism
+10	Social order is fixed by religion, blood or inherited hierarchy and is not open to revision by majorities.	Saudi religious monarchy, Taliban

AU

Organisation of power

Score	What it means	Anchor cases
−10	No coercive central authority at all; coordination by voluntary federation or contract.	Anarcho-communism, anarcho-capitalism
−05	Strong, genuinely independent checks: courts, opposition, press, federal units, proportional representation.	Frente Amplio, SPD
00	Ordinary constitutional government with a strong executive, or a movement with no settled institutional doctrine.	US New Deal, Sinn Féin
+05	Elections continue and the institutions that could reverse their outcome are being restructured by the incumbent.	Fidesz, Law and Justice
+10	No lawful opposition, no independent judiciary or press, and no mechanism by which the government can lose.	Stalinism, Taliban, Pinochet regime

SC

Scale of decision

Score	What it means	Anchor cases
−10	Binding decisions taken at commune or village level; higher bodies are delegated and recallable.	Zapatistas, Diggers
−05	Strong federalism or devolution; the centre holds defined and limited competences.	US Jeffersonians, Swiss People’s Party
00	Balanced: significant authority at both national and sub-national level.	Chartism, Free Democratic Party
+05	Unitary national government as the normal locus of decision.	Most European parties
+10	Centralised imperial or supranational authority overriding all subordinate units.	New Imperialism, Stalinism

ID

Rule of membership

Score	What it means	Anchor cases
−10	Membership on residence, consent or common humanity; ancestry is politically irrelevant by principle.	Classical Marxism, Ambedkarism, US civil rights movement
−05	Civic and open, with normal border administration and no ancestral criterion.	UK Labour Party, Liberal Democrats
00	No distinctive position, or a national community defined by participation rather than descent.	Titoism, Taiwanese DPP, Five Star Movement
+05	Confessional or cultural criterion treated as constitutive but acquirable in principle. Restrictive on admission and civic on belonging sits at the low end of this band.	Muslim Brotherhood, Vox, Reform UK, Chega
+10	Closure by descent, race or lineage. Membership cannot be acquired at all.	Nuremberg Laws, apartheid, Juche, Meiji imperial subjecthood

CH

Method and tempo

Score	What it means	Anchor cases
−10	Change only through existing law and persuasion; the existing order is treated as a good in itself.	Burkean conservatism, Metternichian reaction
−05	Programmatic reform pursued entirely through elections, legislation and negotiation.	Les Républicains, US Democratic Party
00	Willing to use exceptional or extra-parliamentary means while stopping short of force.	Suffragism, Five Star Movement
+05	Rupture with the existing order, accepting coercion or emergency rule as necessary.	Sun Yat-sen, Sankarism
+10	Total transformation imposed by force, with political violence treated as legitimate and generative.	Jacobins, Bolsheviks, Khmer Rouge, ISIS

What a distance means

Comparisons report the straight-line distance between two organisations across all six axes at once. The maximum possible separation is 49.0, which would be two organisations at opposite extremes of everything. Roughly: under 12 is effectively the same position, under 24 the same broad family, under 40 different families with real common ground, and above 40 opposed programmes with little shared ground.

The number matters less than its composition. Two pairs can sit the same distance apart for entirely different reasons, and the reason is the content of any claim about them. Every comparison page lists which axes carry the disagreement and which do not.

Equal weighting is an assumption

The distance figure treats a ten-point gap on economics as exactly as important as a ten-point gap on method. Nothing justifies that except convenience. The interactive atlas lets you change the weights and shows the equal-weight figure alongside, so the effect of the choice stays visible.

Whether the codebook actually works

A codebook is only useful if it produces the same score in different hands. This one has never been tested that way, because the atlas has a single coder and inter-coder reliability cannot be self-reported. The interactive atlas therefore includes a blind coding instrument: it shows you one cell's evidence with the score withheld, alongside the anchors above, and asks you to assign a score. Try it, and use the challenge form wherever you disagree by more than two points.

One check does run automatically. Every example case named in the tables above must actually sit at the anchor it illustrates, and ten did not when that was first tested. They were corrected and the check now runs on every page load.

Confidence

Every entry declares a coding confidence. Low means the organisation is recent and moving, that independent reporting is thin, or that qualified specialists disagree about the classification itself rather than about the facts. Entries marked contested are ones where that disagreement is the point, and both readings are given.

Where the axes come from

EC	Economic left–right as operationalised by the Manifesto Project and the Chapel Hill Expert Survey.
CU	The GAL–TAN dimension from the Chapel Hill surveys; adjacent to the Inglehart–Welzel cultural axes.
AU	Linz's litmus test for semi-loyal parties, operationalised as the V-Party Anti-Pluralism Index, plus the executive-constraint and judicial-independence items added to the 2024 Chapel Hill wave.
SC	Centre–periphery and territorial dimensions in the comparative federalism literature, and subsidiarity in Catholic social thought.
ID	The civic/ethnic distinction in nationalism studies, and the V-Party items on immigration, cultural superiority and minority rights.
CH	The reform/revolution distinction internal to socialist historiography, combined with the political-violence component of the Linz criteria.