Tayyar dataset

What's included

• Field-level source citations. Each fact about each entity links back to where it came from — founding year cites a different source than current leader, which cites a different source than legal status. The coverage page tracks the rollup.
• 16 calibrated axes. Economic, social, state-religion, democracy, west-alignment, regional-stance, Palestinian question, civil liberties, regime stance, pan-Arab, federalism, modernization, gender, iran-posture, press-freedom, sectarianism. Each one comes with a scoring rubric and concrete MENA examples anchored along the scale.
• Richer status than yes/no. Parties carry a government role (lead, coalition major / minor, confidence-and-supply, opposition major / minor, extra-parliamentary, banned) and a legal status (legal, restricted, outlawed, dissolved, merged away). Opposition and independent flags sit alongside.
• Declared vs. behavioral on key cases. Parties like Hezbollah and Hamas read as more committed to democracy in what they declare than in what they do; 20 parties carry a rhetoric-vs-record gap that is itself the finding. The home compass has a lens toggle to switch between views.
• 426 primary-source documents and 101 verified quotes. The document corpus carries verbatim manifestos, charters, parliamentary speeches, and UN addresses with country / party / politician attribution. The quote corpus drives Who-said-it and the "On the record" sections on every party / politician page.
• A semi-live event feed. Pulse tracks recent political shifts with a confidence rating — confirmed, reported, rumored, speculative — so in-flux developments (party formations, merger talks) can sit alongside confirmed events without being conflated. Subscribable as RSS.
• Frozen, versioned release. The full dataset is published as v1.0 — every table as CSV and JSON with a codebook README, CITATION.cff, and SHA-256 checksums. One deliberate exclusion: the r7-dvb study round ships with its own pre-registered paper, not here. A Zenodo DOI is in registration.

Cite as

Cite the frozen release for the data and the paper for the instrument. The release tag pins a citation that cannot shift as the live dataset evolves; the Zenodo DOI will be added here once registered.

@misc{gara_tayyar_dataset_v1_0,
  author  = {Gara, Tarek},
  title   = {Tayyar: a MENA political-position dataset scored by a language-model panel},
  year    = {2026},
  version = {v1.0},
  url     = {https://github.com/tarekgara/tarekgara.com/releases/tag/tayyar-dataset-v1.0},
  note    = {Frozen release v1.0 (2026-07-25); CC BY-NC-SA 4.0; DOI via Zenodo pending}
}

@misc{gara_tayyar_2026,
  author        = {Gara, Tarek},
  title         = {The Model as One Rater Among Several: Measuring Political Positions in Data-Sparse Regions with a Language-Model Panel},
  year          = {2026},
  eprint        = {2606.23042},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  primaryClass  = {cs.CY},
  doi           = {10.48550/arXiv.2606.23042},
  url           = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.23042}
}

Gara, T. (2026). The Model as One Rater Among Several: Measuring Political Positions in Data-Sparse Regions with a Language-Model Panel. arXiv:2606.23042. https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.23042

Where to read more

• Methodology — how the dataset got built and where it falls short
• Findings — the structural patterns the data shows
• Coverage — verification status, country breakdowns, special-status leaderboards
• Axes catalog — all 16 axes with correlations and per-axis stats

Data access

The full dataset is public: release v1.0 carries all 17 tables as CSV and JSON — including the panel ratings (12,867 rows across rounds, with round semantics in the bundled codebook), the reliability-program tables, and per-file SHA-256 checksums — under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. One round is deliberately absent: r7-dvb belongs to a pre-registered study and is released with that paper. The live tools keep evolving past the freeze; cite the release, browse the compass. Earlier snapshot v0.2 remains in the repository history.

What's coming next

Changes are tracked as versioned snapshots; the repository will be open-sourced under MIT on publication. The roadmap, in the order it'll land:

• Document-grounded scoring. Positions derived from reading party platforms, speeches, and voting records — with the specific passages cited. The hand-coded scores stay as the baseline; the document-grounded ones replace them as they're produced.
• Inter-rater agreement. Cohen's κ between hand-coded and document-grounded scores reported on methodology. Where they agree, the rubric's doing its job; where they don't, that's a finding worth writing up.
• Lens system at scale. Declared / behavioral / perceived rows generated for every party, not just the hand-coded marquee cases. The compass lens toggle then carries information across the whole dataset.
• Second-pass verification. Each fact and each position score reviewed against primary sources by someone other than the author.