Prescribed, or permitted
Social and cultural order — and why this axis is not religiosity.
The axis, and what it is not
This axis asks whether there is a correct way to live that public authority should enforce. From maximum individual latitude at one end to a prescribed and enforced moral order at the other.
It is not religiosity
The commonest misreading. The Soviet Union was officially atheist, suppressed religious practice, and enforced an extremely prescriptive order on family structure, sexual conduct, artistic production and permissible speech. It sits well toward the prescribed end with no religious content at all. Meanwhile Quaker communities and liberal Protestant denominations hold serious religious commitments alongside strongly permissive positions. A religious answer is one possible source of a prescribed order. It is not the only one, and secular prescriptions have been among the most thorough in history.
| 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 |
Two projects, sixty years apart, at opposite ends
Kemalism from 1923 and Khomeinism from 1979: same region, both modernising in intent, both willing to use state power to transform society. What separates them lives almost entirely on this one axis.
| Organisation | EC | CU | AU | SC | ID | CH |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kemalism | −02 | −04 | +08 | +09 | +06 | +07 |
| Khomeinism | −03 | +10 | +09 | +08 | +09 | +07 |
| gap | 1 | 14 | 1 | 1 | 3 | 0 |
Fourteen points apart on social order. Much closer on the organisation of power, the scale of decision and method — both concentrated authority, both imposed nationally, both treated the state as the instrument of transformation. Read only on form these look similar; read only on content they look like opposites. Both readings are true and neither is enough.
Why this axis moves fastest
Of the six, this is the least stable across an organisation’s lifetime. Parties that have held essentially fixed economic positions for fifty years have moved a long way here in the same period — usually in the permissive direction, and usually following their electorates rather than leading them.
Two consequences follow, and the first catches a great many published claims.
The midpoint moves underneath you. A party that has not changed its stated social position at all can travel several points in relative terms simply because everything around it moved past. Most claims that a party has “become extreme” on social questions turn out, on examination, to be claims about the centre rather than the party.
A snapshot here has a shorter shelf life than on any other axis. Codings on this axis should always be read with their date attached.
Separate the two questions
Take a party you know well and answer these separately, in writing:
- Does it hold that there is a correct way to live which public authority should enforce? That is this axis.
- Does it define who belongs to the political community by descent, or by something acquirable? That is a different axis — module six.
These two correlate at 0.86 across the corpus, which is high enough that the atlas publishes it as a weakness. They are not the same question, and the cases where they come apart — secular ethnonationalisms, religious universalisms — are the ones a single label gets most wrong.
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