Method
How it works
In order: what you are asked, how an answer becomes a number, how party positions are obtained, what the result contains, and what it cannot tell you.
01 — The statements
There are 100 statements. Each is a claim about policy — what the state should do, pay for, permit or prohibit. None names a party, a politician or a movement.
The statements never change between countries. That is deliberate: it keeps the instrument stable, stops the questions themselves from being tilted by whoever wrote a particular country's pack, and means your five axis scores are directly comparable with someone else's on the other side of the world.
Each statement is also filed under one of ten policy areas, which is what produces the breakdown at the end.
02 — Answering and scoring
You answer each statement from strongly disagree (−2) to strongly agree (+2), or leave it blank. Every party holds a coded position on the identical scale.
Agreement with a party on a statement is:
1 − |your answer − their position| ÷ 4
That figure is averaged across everything you answered. Statements you leave blank drop out of both sides, so leaving one costs precision rather than skewing the result. Fewer than twenty scored statements produces no result at all.
03 — The five axes
Alongside the party match, your answers are scored onto five axes. Each is reported on its own, from −100 at one pole to +100 at the other. They are scored identically in every country.
04 — Where party positions come from
A country pack is a list of the parties that contest elections there, plus each party's coded position on all 100 statements.
Hand-checked packs. For every country listed on the survey, positions are written and checked by hand from published party platforms. This is the only way a country gets added.
Countries not yet listed. We are two university students reading platforms one party at a time, so the list is short and grows slowly. If your country is missing, ask for it on Contact and it goes on the queue.
Disputable coding. Any party can be removed from the comparison before you answer. If you think a coded position misreads a platform, write to us with the document and we will check it — the coding is a judgement, not a fact, and it is ours to defend.
05 — What stops it pushing you
Balanced polarity. Forty-four statements are written so that agreeing is the progressive answer and forty-four so that agreeing is the conservative one. The remaining twelve concern how power is held and checked, which does not divide neatly along that line. People tend to agree with whatever is put in front of them, and splitting the wording cancels most of that out.
Trade-offs, not villains. "Corporate tax rates should be cut to attract investment," not "tax breaks for the rich."
No ordering of results. Parties appear in the order the arithmetic puts them and nowhere else. No party is highlighted, promoted or described as the sensible option.
06 — What the result contains
A ranked party match, showing weighted agreement with each party across every statement you answered. A compass plotting you and the parties, economic on the horizontal and social on the vertical. Your position on each of the five axes. And a table of agreement by policy area, so a party you match overall can still be far from you on housing or on immigration.
The ten areas are: economy and taxation; work and wages; housing and land; health and social protection; education; environment and energy; immigration and national identity; crime, policing and civil liberties; social values, religion and minorities; foreign policy and democracy.
07 — Known limits
A single axis cannot describe a person
Reducing a political position to one number discards most of what you said. The five axes are reported separately, and a person can sit at one end of one and the other end of the next without any inconsistency. The party match percentage is a measure of agreement with a platform, not a summary of who you are.
Universal statements lose local texture
A question about land rights means something very different in Scotland and in Zimbabwe, and this survey asks it the same way in both. Comparability across countries is bought at the cost of local precision.
Generated packs are not a source
Where a pack was generated rather than hand-checked, the coding is a reading of party platforms and can be wrong. Parties also shift between elections. Treat close results as ties, and check anything that matters against the party's own material.
You are reporting yourself
The survey measures what you say you think about a hundred statements. That is not the same as how you behave, what you prioritise, or how you would vote when only a few parties are on the ballot.
08 — Corrections
If a statement is ambiguous, if a policy area looks wrong, or if a coded party position does not match that party's published platform, write and say so. Details are on Contact.