Who belongs
The rule of membership, and the recoding that moved thirty scores.
Four tiers of closure
The axis runs from membership available to anyone present to membership closed by descent.
| Open | Membership follows from presence and participation. Anyone living under the authority is a member of the community it governs. |
| Civic | Membership follows from allegiance to institutions and law. Acquirable by anyone willing to take it on, but it must be taken on. |
| Cultural | Membership requires assimilation into a substantive way of life — language, custom, often religion. Acquirable, at a much higher price. |
| Ancestral | Membership follows from descent and cannot be acquired at all. Someone born outside remains outside permanently, regardless of conduct. |
The step from cultural to ancestral is a difference of kind rather than degree. A cultural rule is demanding and in principle satisfiable. An ancestral rule is not satisfiable by any action available to a person, which is why that step is the most consequential move on the axis.
| 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 |
Why this axis was recoded, and what changed
The first version of this axis measured attitudes to immigration. That was wrong, for two reasons that only became visible once enough entries existed.
Immigration policy is a policy, not a principle. A social democratic government restricting immigration to protect wage floors and an ethnonationalist movement restricting it to preserve descent are doing the same thing for incompatible reasons. Coding them together put entries side by side that had nothing in common.
It made the axis useless before about 1900, and useless for any organisation not governing a state. A third of the corpus could not be coded at all.
Recoding to the rule of membership fixed both. The question became: on what basis does someone belong, and can an outsider acquire it? Thirty entries moved, mostly parties whose immigration policies were restrictive and whose membership rules were civic.
This is recorded in the module because a scheme that never reports having been wrong is not being checked. The revision log is public.
The signature pair
| Organisation | EC | CU | AU | SC | ID | CH |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Anarcho-Communism | −09 | −07 | −10 | −10 | −08 | +06 |
| Anarcho-Capitalism | +10 | +01 | −10 | −10 | −02 | +03 |
| gap | 19 | 8 | 0 | 0 | 6 | 3 |
Nineteen points apart on economics, identical on the organisation of power, and six apart here — on a question that is doctrinally central to both. Anarcho-communism is universalist by construction; the property-based tradition makes belonging a function of contract and title. Invisible on every other axis.
Test a claim about belonging
Find a recent public argument about who belongs — citizenship, immigration, national identity, membership of a union or federation.
Write down what each side is actually claiming: is the disagreement about the basis of membership, or about the number of people admitted under an agreed basis? Those are different arguments. The first is on this axis. The second is a policy dispute between people who may agree entirely on the axis, and it is the one most often mistaken for the first.
One or two emails a month, or none at all
Nine free modules, nothing gated, nothing to fill in. The update carries codings that changed, new claim checks, and at least one finding that went against the atlas. Nothing else, and one click to stop.
Site owner: set FORMSPREE_ID in offers.py to activate this form.