About this project
What Map of Politics is, how the map works, and why we think being open about our editorial choices matters more than pretending we don't have any.
What is this?
Map of Politics is an evidence-based project documenting how right-wing political decisions affect real people. We track government periods, historical events, polling data, and current threats to past achievements across multiple countries.
Every event in our timeline is sourced. Every claim links to a primary source. If we can't source it, we don't publish it.
That said: this is not a neutral project. We believe right-wing ideology, as it has been practised in most wealthy democracies over the past 40 years, has on balance caused measurable harm to the majority of people. We think the evidence supports that. We present that evidence and let you disagree with our conclusions.
How the map works
Each country on the map is coloured by the political leaning of its current government. Click a country to open its detail panel, which includes recent political events, polling data, and the historical timeline.
The colour scale runs from green (left) through yellow (centre) to red (right). We use five categories overall: Far Left, Centre Left, Centre, Centre Right, and Far Right. These refer to the current government's positioning, not the country's population as a whole.
What our labels mean (and don't mean)
Political labels are inherently reductive. We use them anyway because they're useful shorthand, but we want to be upfront about their limits.
We assess governments on two separate axes rather than a single left-right scale, because those two things often point in different directions.
How the government approached markets, public spending, and taxation. Hard Left means heavy public ownership; Hard Right means aggressive privatisation and deregulation.
How the government treated civil liberties, minority rights, the press, and democratic norms. Independent of economic policy.
Why this matters
Boris Johnson, for example, increased public spending during Covid on a scale most left-wing governments would recognise, and presided over record immigration despite the rhetoric. He was centrist economically. But his government restricted protest rights, used culture war as political strategy, and created a Rwanda deportation scheme. That's authoritarian socially. A single label couldn't capture either of those things accurately.
Why some countries are marked as Dictatorships
The left-right political spectrum is a tool designed for democracies — it describes how governments use state power within a system where voters can remove them. That framework breaks down entirely when elections aren't genuine.
We classify a country as a Dictatorship when the peaceful, legitimate transfer of power through elections is not genuinely possible. The test is simple: can the government be voted out?
Countries currently classified as Dictatorships
We are aware that some people — including state-sponsored commentators — will dispute these classifications, particularly for Russia and China. Our position: if you have to imprison, exile, or kill your opponents to stay in power, you are not running a democracy. The classification stands.
These states are not the primary focus of this site. We document them because their existence is relevant context for the warning signs we track in democracies — what happens when democratic norms erode without resistance.
These are our interpretations
Every label on this site reflects our reading of the evidence. Reasonable people disagree about where to place governments on these scales. David Cameron legalised same-sex marriage, which is progressive. He also oversaw the bedroom tax and austerity, which are not. Keir Starmer has been criticised from the left on trans rights, and from the right on tax rises. Where you put any of these leaders depends on which policies you weight most heavily.
We try to weight by scale of harm: policies that affected millions of people, or caused irreversible damage to institutions, count for more in our assessment than individual policy positions. But we're making a judgment. You might make a different one. That's fine.
If you think we've got something factually wrong, the sourced events in our timeline are the most important thing to challenge. The labels are our opinion. The events are documented reality.
How we score event severity
Each event in our timeline is given a severity score from 1 to 5. These are not vibes scores, they're based on documented scale of impact.
Attribution: was this actually their fault?
Not every bad thing that happened under a government was caused by that government. We track attribution separately for each event. Some things are global in origin (the 2008 financial crisis was triggered in the US); others are direct policy choices with no external cause.
Data sources
All events link to primary sources where available: official government documents, inquiry reports, academic research, and established journalism. We prefer primary sources over commentary.
Polling data comes from national polling aggregators. We show the most recent available snapshot, clearly dated. Polls are inherently uncertain; we don't present them as predictions.
The historical record is never complete. If something significant is missing, it's usually because we haven't got to it yet. The database is a work in progress.
Corrections and contact
If a sourced fact in our database is wrong, we want to know and will correct it. If you disagree with a label or severity score, we're genuinely interested in the argument. We make no claim to infallibility.