At what level?
Scale of decision — the axis that carries whole arguments invisibly.
The least discussed axis
From decisions taken at the smallest practicable unit to decisions taken at the largest. This is the axis of subsidiarity, federalism, secession and supranational authority — and it carries whole arguments invisibly.
| 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 |
The same policy at two scales is two policies
Take a policy — a minimum wage, an environmental standard, a school curriculum — and consider it imposed by a municipality, by a national government, and by a supranational body.
The content is identical. The politics are entirely different, and people who support it at one level frequently oppose it at another. That is not hypocrisy. A person can consistently hold that a policy is correct and that it should be decided by the people it affects; their opponent can consistently hold that a right which varies by postcode is not a right. Both positions are about this axis and neither is about the policy.
Most disputes about European integration have this shape. So do most disputes about federal versus state authority, most about local government autonomy, and a large share of what gets filed under “populism”.
Where the axis carries the whole disagreement
Movements for national self-determination make a claim almost entirely about scale: the current unit of decision is wrong and a smaller one is correct. On the other five axes they distribute across the whole range.
| Organisation | EC | CU | AU | SC | ID | CH |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Scottish National Party | −04 | −06 | −04 | −07 | −03 | −05 |
| Zapatistas | −08 | −06 | −06 | −10 | +03 | +03 |
| gap | 4 | 0 | 2 | 3 | 6 | 8 |
Two movements demanding a smaller unit of decision, three points apart on scale and a long way apart on almost everything else. Grouping them as a family by their shared label produces nothing useful; what they share is a position on one axis, and it is not the one the label reports.
The finding a country page gives you
Every country in the atlas reports the range its organisations span on each axis. The settled axis is usually more revealing than the contested one, and it is the one foreign coverage never reports — because a question nobody argues about generates no copy.
Find your country's settled axis
Open your own country’s page in the atlas. Look at the six range bars and find the shortest one.
That is the question your politics has stopped arguing about. Ask yourself whether you had noticed — most people have not, because settled questions are invisible from inside. Then look at the longest bar, and check whether the arguments you actually hear are about that axis or about a different one.
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