Glossary
Short definitions of the terms you'll see on the site. For the history behind each tradition and links to outside sources, see Backgrounders.
Political traditions
- Communist
- Holds that capitalism rests on a small class owning the factories, land, and capital while everyone else has to sell their labor — and that this can't be permanently fixed by reform, only replaced. Aims for a society where productive property is held in common and production serves need rather than profit. A broad tradition: the one-party states of the 20th century are one strand of it; anti-authoritarian and democratic currents reject that model.
- Internal strands: Marxist-Leninists · council and libertarian communists · Trotskyists · Eurocommunists · Western Marxists
- Conservative
- Trusts customs and institutions that have lasted a long time, on the theory that they hold hard-won practical wisdom. Prefers change that is slow, tested, and easy to undo if it goes wrong. It's a broad label — free-market, religious/traditional, and nationalist strands often disagree with each other.
- Internal strands: small-government conservatives · social conservatives · neoconservatives · national conservatives
- Democratic Socialist
- Believes voting isn't enough on its own — that ordinary people should also have real power over the economy, through things like worker-owned companies and public control of key industries. Keeps free elections, a free press, and free speech. Goes further than social democrats, who are content to leave most of the economy in private hands.
- Internal strands: reformers · market socialists · social democrats
- Libertarian
- Starts from the idea that people should be free to live and trade as they choose, and that the government has to make a strong case before restricting that. Ranges from people who want a small government (just courts, police, defense) to those who want none at all.
- Internal strands: small-state libertarians · anarcho-capitalists · classical liberals
- Neoconservative
- Believes American power, used confidently, is the best guarantor of a free and stable world: back democratic allies, confront authoritarian regimes rather than accommodate them, keep the military strong, and lead instead of deferring to international institutions. Began among former liberals who moved right in the 1960s–70s; today defined mostly by that assertive foreign policy — and still reckoning with the Iraq War.
- Internal strands: first-generation (domestic-policy) neoconservatives · democracy promoters · democratic realists · the post-2016 Never Trump wing
- Progressive
- Wants government to step in and fix problems that markets and older institutions leave unsolved — expanding rights and protections, backed by evidence. Works within a market economy: the aim is to curb capitalism's downsides, not to end private ownership of business.
- Internal strands: New Deal liberals · practical reformers
Want more depth? Read the Backgrounders.
The spectrum labels
- Left
- A committed progressive framing: reaches for structural and systemic explanations, foregrounds power imbalances and corporate or state accountability, and wants substantial change rather than adjustment.
- Centre-left
- A mainstream liberal framing: sympathetic to reform and government action, but working inside existing institutions and a market economy rather than questioning them.
- Centre
- A genuine centrist framing — not a neutral one. Distrusts both poles, prefers incremental and institutional fixes, and often thinks each side has hold of part of the truth. The plain account of what happened sits separately, above all five.
- Centre-right
- A mainstream conservative framing: cautious about rapid change, attentive to cost, order, institutions, and unintended consequences.
- Right
- A committed conservative framing: foregrounds sovereignty, tradition, security, and scepticism of elite authority or state power, and is willing to break with the status quo to protect them.
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.
- 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).