Political Glossary

Master the language of power and policy. Use our glossary to understand the terms that shape our world.

Affective polarisation: Dislike and distrust of members of an opposing political group, as distinct from disagreement about policy. In most democracies it has risen considerably faster than measured policy disagreement, meaning people who agree on more than they realise can nonetheless dislike each other intensely.
Anarchism: The rejection of all involuntary hierarchy, including the state. It divides sharply on economics: social anarchists reject private ownership of productive property, while anarcho-capitalists treat it as the foundation of a stateless order.
Authoritarianism: A political position favouring strong central authority, restricted political pluralism and limited individual autonomy. On a two-axis compass it forms the upper half of the vertical axis and is compatible with any economic position.
Capability approach: Amartya Sen's framework for evaluating wellbeing by what a person is actually able to do and to be, rather than by their income or their formal rights. It underpins the argument that freedom requires material means, not only the absence of interference.
Centrism: A position near the midpoint of one or both axes. It can reflect a considered preference for moderation and incremental change, or simply a low level of engagement with the questions — the two are indistinguishable in a compass result.
Civic nationalism: A conception of the nation defined by shared institutions and political commitments rather than by descent or ethnicity, and therefore open in principle to anyone who accepts them.
Cleavage: A durable social division that organises party competition — historically class, religion, region and urban-rural. Lipset and Rokkan argued that European party systems froze around the cleavages salient when mass suffrage arrived.
Collectivism: The view that group welfare and collective decision-making should take precedence over individual preference where the two conflict. Often used loosely as an antonym for individualism, which obscures that most positions combine elements of both.
Corporatism: The organisation of economic policy through negotiation between the state and peak associations of employers and workers. Democratic corporatism underlies Nordic wage bargaining; authoritarian corporatism, as under Italian fascism, replaced independent unions with state-controlled bodies.
Decommodification: Esping-Andersen's measure of the extent to which a person can maintain a decent standard of living without selling their labour. It is the key variable distinguishing welfare state regimes from one another.
Degrowth: The argument that rich economies must deliberately reduce material throughput, because efficiency gains have historically been absorbed by increased consumption rather than reducing total resource use.
Democratic centralism: Lenin's organisational principle: open debate within the party before a decision, then absolute unity in carrying it out. Critics argued from the outset that in practice the first half withers and the second remains.
Distributism: The position that productive property should be widely owned by ordinary families rather than concentrated in corporations or the state — a rejection of capitalism and socialism on the same grounds rather than opposite ones.
Egalitarianism: The principle that people are of equal moral worth and that political arrangements should reflect it. Egalitarians differ sharply on what should be equalised: outcomes, opportunities, resources, capabilities or standing.
Ethnic nationalism: A conception of the nation defined by descent, language, religion or inherited culture, in which membership cannot be acquired by consent.
Flexicurity: The Danish combination of weak employment protection, high income replacement during unemployment, and heavily funded retraining and placement services. It protects the worker rather than the job, and collapses into ordinary insecurity if the spending is cut while the flexibility remains.
Harm principle: John Stuart Mill's criterion that power may be exercised over an individual against their will only to prevent harm to others. Its application turns entirely on what counts as harm, which Mill left substantially undefined.
Hegemony: Antonio Gramsci's concept for rule maintained through the general acceptance of a set of ideas as common sense, rather than through force. It explains why some arrangements persist without visible coercion.
Horseshoe theory: The claim that the far left and far right resemble each other more than either resembles the centre. A two-axis model gives a more precise account: they can be close on the authority axis while remaining maximally distant on the economic one, which is a different statement.
Jevons paradox: The observation, made by William Stanley Jevons in 1865 about coal, that improvements in the efficiency of a resource's use often increase rather than decrease total consumption of it, because efficiency lowers the effective price.
Left-wing: Originating in the seating arrangement of the French National Assembly of 1789, where opponents of royal authority sat to the president's left. Through the industrial era it came to denote support for redistribution, collective provision and the interests of labour.
Liberalism: A tradition organised around limiting power over individuals and requiring authority to justify itself. Its classical and social variants share this method and divide on economics, which is why liberalism spans the whole horizontal axis on a compass.
Libertarianism: In the compass sense, the lower half of the vertical axis: a preference for individual autonomy and against state authority. In the ordinary political sense, particularly in the United States, it denotes a specific right-libertarian tradition combining that preference with free-market economics.
Meritocracy: Allocation of position by talent and effort rather than birth. The word was coined by Michael Young in 1958 as satire, describing a society whose hierarchy would be crueller precisely because it was deserved.
Minarchism: The position that the state is legitimate but should be confined to courts, police and defence — the night-watchman state.
Negative liberty: Freedom understood as the absence of interference by others. Isaiah Berlin's term, and the sense of liberty on which most classical liberal and libertarian argument depends.
Nolan Chart: David Nolan's 1971 diagram plotting economic freedom against personal freedom on a square rotated forty-five degrees, designed to give libertarianism a position that a single left-right line could not represent.
Ordoliberalism: The German position that competitive markets do not arise spontaneously but must be constructed and defended by a strong state that sets rules without directing outcomes.
Populism: A thin-centred ideology dividing society into a pure people and a corrupt elite, and claiming that politics should express the general will. Because it is thin-centred it attaches to host ideologies of left or right, and has no coordinates of its own on a compass.
Positive liberty: Freedom understood as the actual capacity to direct one's own life, which may require resources, education and health as well as non-interference. Berlin warned that the concept can be extended to justify coercion in a person's supposed real interest.
Predistribution: Shaping how market income is generated in the first place — through bargaining institutions, wage boards, worker representation and broad asset ownership — rather than correcting the distribution afterwards through tax and transfer.
Right-wing: Originating with the supporters of royal authority who sat to the president's right in the French National Assembly of 1789. Through the industrial era it came to denote support for private property, market allocation and established social hierarchy.
Rule of law: The requirement that government act through general, prospective, publicly known rules that bind rulers as well as the ruled. Distinct from rule by law, in which law is an instrument of the ruler rather than a constraint on them.
Social contract: The device, used by Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and Rawls, of justifying political authority by reference to what rational people would agree to. The versions differ enormously in what they claim would be agreed and under what conditions.
Sorting: The process by which previously cross-cutting identities — religion, region, occupation, education, consumption — come to align with party. It raises hostility between groups without necessarily increasing disagreement about policy.
Subsidiarity: The principle that decisions should be taken at the lowest level competent to take them, with higher bodies supporting rather than absorbing lower ones. Originating in Catholic social teaching and now written into European Union treaty law.
Syndicalism: The doctrine that workers should take control of production directly through their own federated unions, rejecting both parliamentary parties and revolutionary vanguards as vehicles of change.
Technocracy: Government by those with relevant technical expertise rather than by elected representatives. Widely accepted in narrow domains such as central banking and medicines regulation, and contested wherever decisions involve value trade-offs that expertise cannot rank.
Welfare state: The set of public institutions providing income security, healthcare, education and social services. Esping-Andersen distinguishes liberal, conservative-corporatist and social democratic regimes by how far they decommodify.