PRISM
political refraction and identity spectrum model
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PRISM

political refraction and identity spectrum model
A comprehensive political disposition assessment that maps you to one of 20,391 composable political archetypes across 17 latent dimensions, with questions that adapt in real time via Bayesian posterior updating. See how you would have voted in every U.S. presidential election since 1789 — and your alignment with governments around the world.
20,391
Archetypes
17
Dimensions
~27
Questions
 
60 U.S. elections · 1789–2024
world alignment · current regimes
vote: dem rep third abstain
regime fit: opposed neutral aligned
live engine output — your own pattern is computed when you finish
further reading · matrices of confusion
essay · feb 2026 · 12 min
The Cause of Our Politics
Traditional political compasses measure ideology through stated beliefs, but miss the deeper structures — temperament, identity, worldview — that actually produce political behavior. The same policy position can emerge from fundamentally different causal sources, so a meaningful model has to identify the upstream dispositional factors that stay stable even as surface beliefs shift.
read on matrices of confusion
essay · mar 2026 · 13 min
Beneath the Surface of Belief
Political beliefs emerge from layered interactions between innate neurology, developmental experience, and environmental conditions — not from surface opinions alone. Understanding political temperament means mapping those deeper dimensions, since the same underlying structure activates differently depending on which conditions become salient.
read on matrices of confusion