I've been frustrated with the poor or lacking taxonomic clarity in political discourse, so I decided to build my own. My ambition is to build an "a priori" (in the colloquial sense) taxonomy and connect this to data as well as the existing terminology.

Most political terms are "a posteriori" and to my mind, that's the source of, or a major contributor to, this confusion. Even academics tend to use terms that are ill-defined or rather of varying definitions. Especially in debates no progress is made towards understanding, because neither party takes the time to establish mutually agreed definitions.

What I'm looking for is thoughts on;

Is the "a priori" approach possible and practical? Does it have potential to lead to more rational, if not more fruitful political debates?

Are the dimensions I propose suitable or are there others that would be better?

I strived to keep the taxonomy neutral, but if I'm blind to some implicit bias in the framework do let me know - I'm not necessarily interested in debating the politics themselves; I'm more interested in whether the framework is conceptually useful.

Naturally, having developed a taxonomy I also developed a questionnaire to plot people onto a field of possible positions. If you're interested by the idea feel free to give it a spin and report back any findings or gripes.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/10lZa1B1kVWWZP_2SYcPBrqYhyO-RTP7yc5ntXsAC-Ak/copy

I'm not particularly interested in feedback on the methodology (of which there is none).

The link also contains a brief free-spirited account of the history of socialism and capitalism, as well as the introduction, which I copy below:

Towards a new taxonomy of politics

The purpose of this chart is to build a representation of political alignment that is independent of any particular historical context.

Most political terms are shaped by the historical conflicts in which they emerged. Their meanings can therefore become layered, internally inconsistent, and context-dependent: speakers may use the same term while referring to different aspects of its history, theory, institutional form, or present-day associations. (See "The semantics of capitalism vs socialism" for a more in-depth exploration of this concept)

The approach taken in this present framework is different. Rather than taking the political parlance of any particular period as its starting point, this work seeks to isolate dimensions that are relevant across different political systems and historical periods and then plot systems according to these dimensions.

The taxonomy has a primary axis of equality, divided into three subdimensions: economic, political and judicial equality. On this axis, equality refers specifically to the distribution of benefits.

Each of these dimensions has a further aspect: control. The taxonomy therefore asks not only how equally benefits are distributed, but how equally the corresponding forms of power and control are distributed.

This allows us to distinguish systems that are egalitarian in a legal and political sense, but not economically, or those that are egalitarian economically but not politically etc

Crucially this classification does not carry any normative judgment. Some political ideologies hold that barriers capital accumulation and redistributive taxation has negative effects and is in itself immoral, the resulting inequality is obviously not necessarily the aim of the ideology but it is an effect, the aim of course is the freedom from meddling as well as the growth supposed to result from this freedom. Conversely equality is not necessarily the aim of egalitarian ideologies but rather the resulting improvement of quality of life and societal stability its supposed to bring. Supporters of such ideologies are liable to make claims about the effect of the policies they support, and the policies supported by other ideologies, both might well claim the other will harm growth and quality of life.

This framework does not attempt to settle these empirical or moral disputes. The wider effects of different economic arrangements on growth, freedom, welfare, innovation, and social stability are contested. Their immediate distributive consequences, however , such as whether income and wealth are redistributed or allowed to remain concentrated, are observable and can be compared directly.

The framework begins with dimensions that are likely to remain politically relevant across a very wide range of conceivable societies and they strive to be analytically clean, the dimensions logically defined rather than historically derived. They avoid bundling considerations that might be commonly aligned by people but are not logically connected - such as political and economic equality

It does not in the basic version lend itself easily to understanding a particular political situation where rivaling sides might well have far more immediate concerns than these overarching principles.

For example; immigration, environmentalism, control and benefit of the internet, particular control and organization of specific societal systems such as schools or healthcare might be added as dimensions. Immigration and climate change are somewhat added as subsets of equality in terms of whether future generations and outsiders are included in the concerns of society and to what extent but that is not the same as having these concerns at the forefront, nor does it fully capture what these issues might encapsulate

A perhaps glaring omission from this taxonomy is the matter of state vs private ownership. From the perspective of equality of control there is no difference between a few state employees or a few capitalists being in control of the economy if the distribution is the same

Rather than forcing such concerns into bundles that merely reflect how contemporary political parties happen to combine and answer them, the architecture of this taxonomy instead suggests adding separate coordinates for each politically relevant dimension.

Political ideologies can then be represented not as points on a single inherited spectrum, but as positions within a multidimensional space.

Conceptually this leads us to 9 overarching positions for each dimension, for example the economic dimension would be:

Accounting for the political and judicial dimensions we might get a somewhat more specific terminology within this framework that match possible meanings of these words and act as proposals for systematic, set, definitions

These definitions obviously exclude other partial and possible definitions that are less in key with the overall a-historic taxonomy.

They are not to be understood as more true definitions or as more fully expressing the history of the terms. I also want to stress that one can adopt or consider the conceptual frame of benefit and control without adopting this proposed use of terminology. Rather they are proposed as pragmatic terms that people are familiar with and that have meaning adjacent or overlapping with how they are most commonly used, but more specifically defined, while also matching the framework. If one is more comfortable with using the more narrow distribution of benefit/control across the three dimensions, adopting the proposed definitions is not necessary.