Political parties on the political compass
Where does a party actually stand? Manifestos are written to win votes and slogans to blur differences, so this section relies on a different source: the 2024 Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES), in which 609 political scientists rated the leaderships of 279 European parties between October and December 2024.
We have taken the 50 parties of the five countries this site is written for and placed them on the same two axes as our test. Each country page shows the map, the numbers behind it and where the parties stand on seven specific issues. When you finish the test, your result is compared with the parties of the country you choose.
Written by Ottavio Malatacca · Updated
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How the positions are calculated
CHES asks country experts to place each party on an economic scale from 0 (extreme left) to 10 (extreme right), covering privatisation, taxes, regulation, government spending and the welfare state. A second scale, called GAL–TAN, runs from 0 (libertarian or post-materialist: expanded personal freedoms, abortion rights, same-sex marriage, democratic participation) to 10 (traditional or authoritarian: order, tradition, stability and a state that acts as a moral authority).
We use the average expert rating for each party and convert both scales to the compass range of −10 to +10: compass position = (CHES score − 5) × 2. A party rated 7.5 on the economic scale therefore appears at +5.0, and one rated 2.5 at −5.0. Nothing else is adjusted.
To find the parties closest to you, we measure the straight-line distance on the compass between your result and each party of the country you select. The issue scores on the country pages are CHES's own ratings (0–10, or 1–7 for European integration), shown without conversion.
What this data cannot tell you
- The ratings describe party leaderships in late 2024. Parties move, and some have changed leader, alliance or programme since.
- Vote shares come from the national election before the survey: Italy 2022, Germany 2021, Spain 2023, France and the United Kingdom 2024.
- Our test's social axis and the GAL–TAN scale measure closely related but not identical things. Our questions include state surveillance and military intervention; GAL–TAN gives more weight to moral and cultural questions. Read the comparison with your own result as an approximation, not as a voting recommendation.
- An average hides disagreement, among experts and inside parties. CHES also measures how blurred each party's position is, and the country pages mention it where it matters.
Source and citation
Rovny, Jan, Jonathan Polk, Ryan Bakker, Liesbet Hooghe, Seth Jolly, Gary Marks, Marco Steenbergen and Milada Anna Vachudova. 2025. “The 2024 Chapel Hill Expert Survey on political party positioning in Europe: Twenty-five years of party positional data.” chesdata.eu.
The choice of countries, the conversion to the compass and the commentary are ours; the CHES team is not responsible for them. Every figure on these pages is taken directly from the published dataset (CHES_2024_final_v2) without manual adjustment. chesdata.eu
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