Political Parties Explained

Choose a country below to explore its political parties. Each guide explains a party in plain language and links out to primary sources so you can go deeper.

What each guide covers

Every profile follows the same structure, so you can compare parties across countries without re-learning the format. We open with the essentials in a fact box: when the party was founded, who currently leads it, where it is headquartered, and where it sits on the left-right spectrum.

From there the guide walks through the party's history, its economic policy, its social policy, and its foreign policy, then summarises the concrete positions it currently campaigns on. A compass section places the party on the same two axes the CoreOpinion test uses, so you can see directly how your own result compares. Each profile closes with its most consequential figures and a list of sources.

How we decide what goes in

We describe what a party believes and how it argues for itself. We do not rate parties, rank them, or tell you which one to support.

Positions are drawn from the party's published platform, its recent voting record where it holds seats, and its leadership's stated priorities. Where a party is genuinely divided internally, we say so rather than flattening it into a single line, because the split is often the most useful thing to understand about it. Compass placements are our editorial judgement and are deliberately presented as approximate.

Why parties resist easy labels

Labels travel badly. A party called liberal means something close to centre-left in Canada and something closer to centre-right in Australia. Green parties are consistently left on economics in some countries and much closer to the centre in others. A party can be economically interventionist and socially permissive at the same time, which a single left-to-right line cannot represent at all.

That is why each guide gives you both a written explanation and a two-axis position rather than one label. It is also why the country tests are built separately: the meaningful political questions in Sweden are not the meaningful political questions in the United States, and a test that pretends otherwise gives you a worse answer.

Keeping these current

Party politics moves. Leaders are replaced, parties merge and split, and platforms are rewritten between elections. We review these guides regularly and date each profile's last revision. If you spot something out of date or wrong, tell us on the contact page with a source and we will correct it.