How scores work
Polimap shows positions and the evidence behind them, not verdicts. Every number on a politician's page comes from public records described here.
Where the data comes from
- Politicians, offices, parties, parliamentary groups, ideologies and photos: Wikidata, for every country.
- US Congress roll calls since 1789: Voteview (UCLA).
- US bills and laws since 1973: Congress.gov (Library of Congress).
- US executive orders and proclamations since 1994: the Federal Register.
- US state legislators: Open States.
- Brazil's Chamber of Deputies votes since 2003: the Chamber's open-data files.
- European Parliament votes since 2019 (final votes on each text): HowTheyVote.eu.
The compass
Every politician is placed on the same compass, with the same labels in every country: Liberal Left to Conservative Right across, More Libertarian to More Authoritarian up and down. Words are used in their international sense, never a country's local one. What they did comes first; labels fill the gaps.
Left – right
From their own roll-call votes when we have them. For the US this is DW-NOMINATE, the standard political-science measure from Voteview. For other legislatures Polimap computes its own from every member's yes and no votes; checked against DW-NOMINATE on four US Congresses, the two agree at a correlation of 0.96 to 0.97. In the European Parliament the strongest split is for or against the EU, so the scale is turned to run from the left groups (The Left, Greens) to the right ones (ECR, Patriots, ESN). Without votes: their own ideologies recorded on Wikidata, else their party's position (its members' votes, else its stated alignment, else its ideologies).
Libertarian – authoritarian
Personal freedom versus state power: police, surveillance, censorship, detention and deportation, emergency powers, curbs on courts, press and opponents, against civil liberties, privacy and due process. Economics (taxes, spending, regulation) belongs to left – right and is not counted here. An AI model (Claude) reads every roll call, law and executive order and codes what a YES does on this axis; procedural and purely economic items are left out.
Legislators are measured by how their vote differs from the rest of the chamber on those items (a YES nearly everyone cast says little). Presidents are measured by their own executive orders and proclamations, with the laws enacted in their terms at a quarter of the weight, compared with other presidents. This is blended with the Wikidata estimate (their ideologies, else their party's): (n × record + 20 × estimate) ÷ (n + 20), so a long record outweighs the label. Politicians without a record (most ministers, governors, mayors) are placed from Wikidata alone, and the page says so.
“Votes with their party”
Of a politician's yes and no votes in the two years before their latest vote, the share that matched the majority of members in their current party.
Known gaps
- Votes exist so far for the US Congress, Brazil's Chamber and the European Parliament; other parliaments are still to come.
- Politicians with no party, parliamentary group, ideology or votes on record cannot be placed yet.
- The ideology-to-compass mapping and the AI coding are Polimap's own judgment; both are applied the same way everywhere.
- Many roll calls in Brazil are symbolic votes without individual names, so they don't appear in vote logs.
- Some historical offices have no end date in Wikidata and can show as current.
- Placement from speeches (and the gap between what politicians say and how they vote) is not built yet.