Backgrounders
Where the personas and the spectrum summaries get their picture of each tradition. These write-ups are original and descriptive — they don't endorse any view, they note where each is contested, and they link out so you can check the sources yourself.
Ideologies
Communism (Marxism)
Holds that capitalism rests on a small class owning the means of production while everyone else sells their labour, that this cannot be permanently reformed, and that the goal is a classless society in which productive property is held in common.
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Democratic Socialism
Holds that political democracy is incomplete while economic life stays undemocratic, and seeks to extend public and worker control over the economy without giving up elections or civil liberties.
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Progressivism
Holds that government should actively reform markets and institutions — using evidence and public action — to expand who is included in rights and protections and to correct harms markets leave unaddressed.
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Social Democracy
Accepts a capitalist market economy but pairs it with a large welfare state, strong unions, and active regulation, aiming to soften inequality and insecurity rather than to end private ownership of industry.
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Conservatism
Holds that institutions and customs that have survived and evolved over long periods usually encode accumulated practical wisdom, so change should be gradual, tested, and reversible rather than sweeping and utopian.
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Neoconservatism
A strand of American conservatism, prominent from the 1970s, that pairs an assertive, values-driven foreign policy — using US power to back democratic allies and confront authoritarian regimes — with domestic-policy skepticism of ambitious social engineering.
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Classical Liberalism
The 18th–19th century tradition of individual liberty, limited government, the rule of law, private property, and free exchange — the shared root of both modern liberalism and libertarianism.
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Libertarianism
Holds that individual liberty and voluntary exchange should be the default, and that anyone proposing to restrict them with state coercion carries the burden of proof.
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National Conservatism
Puts the nation — its citizens, borders, and inherited way of life — ahead of global markets, international institutions, and universal ideals, and breaks with older free-market, interventionist conservatism on trade and foreign policy.
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Green Politics / Environmentalism
Puts ecological sustainability at the centre of politics, arguing that economic and social arrangements should be organised within the limits of the natural world, often alongside social-justice and grassroots-democracy commitments.
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Styles of politics
Not fixed ideologies — these attach to positions across the spectrum.
Reading the spectrum labels
The five positions on each story — left, centre-left, centre, centre-right, right — are relative markers, not fixed ideologies. Where the “centre” sits depends on the country and the decade: a policy that is centrist in one democracy can be on the edge in another, and the whole scale shifts over time.
All five are mainstream positions. Prism used to label the outer two “far left” and “far right”, and that was wrong — those terms imply something outside the mainstream, and are usually applied by opponents as criticism. What the summaries actually contain is the strongest version of a committed partisan argument, not an extreme one. Calling a mainstream conservative case “far right”, or a mainstream progressive one “far left”, misdescribes it and insults the reader who holds it.
What separates “left” from “centre-left” here is depth of critique rather than volume: the left asks whether the system itself produces the outcome, the centre-left accepts the system and argues for reform inside it. The same distinction separates “right” from “centre-right”.
The summaries are written to show how framing changes across that range. They are a teaching device, not a measurement — and no summary is a claim about what any real person or outlet said.
Read further
- AllSides — Media Bias Chart — One widely-cited attempt to place US outlets on a left–right scale. Other raters place them differently.
- Pew Research Center — Political Typology — Survey research showing the US public does not divide neatly into two camps.
- Encyclopædia Britannica — “Left–right political spectrum” — Reference-encyclopedia history of where the terms come from (the 1789 French National Assembly).
Links on each page were checked when it was written. The web changes — if one is broken, search the same title. Primary sources are labelled with their perspective so you know what you’re opening; neutral references come first.