reference · terminology

Glossary

Three groups of terms: Tayyar internals (how the dataset is structured — family tags, government roles, lens taxonomy), method (how positions are measured and reported — raters, rounds, agreement, reliability), and MENA political shorthand (Hirak, Nakba, Axis of resistance) that the dataset references but doesn't redefine on every entity page. A non-expert reader who knows comparative politics but not MENA-specific vocabulary should be able to read the dataset confidently after this page.

Tayyar

11 terms

Compass axes: The two axes (economic, social) that drive the default 2-axis political-compass plot on the home page. Distinct from "issue axes," which are the remaining axes that show up on per-party spider charts but are not the default 2D projection.
Issue axes: The non-compass axes — state-religion, democracy, regional alignment, the Palestinian question, civil liberties, gender, sectarianism, and the rest. They populate per-party spider charts and each has its own deep-dive page. The full set is enumerated on /tayyar/issues.
Lens: A scoring perspective. The compass exposes three lenses per axis: composite (default — the weighted single-number summary), declared (manifesto-stated position), and behavioral (vote and action record). Composite covers every (party, axis) pair; declared and behavioral coexist for the subset of parties and axes where rhetoric and record meaningfully diverge, and a lens falls back to composite elsewhere.
Tier-1 / Tier-2: Country classification. Tier-1 countries have seeded party data (compass + spider work for them). Tier-2 countries are map-visible but currently have politician-only or no-party-data coverage (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, UAE, Oman).
Family tag: A coarse ideological classification: islamist (sunni-electoral, shia, militant, salafi), religious (jewish, christian), nationalist (arab, ethnic), leftist (communist, socdem), secular-liberal, other. Used for at-a-glance grouping; the multi-axis position scores are the more precise representation.
Government role: Eight-tier enum for a party's relationship to the current government: lead-party / coalition-major / coalition-minor / confidence-supply / opposition-major / opposition-minor / extra-parliamentary / banned. Captures more nuance than a simple in-government boolean.
Legal status: Five-tier enum for a party's legal standing: legal / restricted / outlawed / dissolved / merged-away. Distinct from government_role: a party can be legal but extra-parliamentary, or outlawed but informally active.
Confidence tier (events): Four-tier enum for Pulse events: confirmed / reported / rumored / speculative. Lets the dataset track in-flux developments alongside confirmed facts without conflating them.
Source citation: A field-level provenance record: {field, url, accessed_at, note}. Each citation supports a specific entity column (founded_year, current_leader_text, etc) — not row-level provenance.
Verification status: Three tiers: unverified, verified (first-pass), and externally verified. First-pass means the entity has been reviewed against widely-available reference sources (Wikipedia, official sites) and has citations attached. Externally verified — the next gate before publication — requires a more careful review against primary sources.
First-pass vs second-pass review: First-pass review checks an entity's facts against widely-available reference sources (mostly Wikipedia and official sites) and attaches citations. Second-pass — planned before any formal publication — is a more careful review against primary sources, upgrading the verification status.

Method

12 terms

Rater: A scorer that produces one estimate for an (entity, axis) cell. Three kinds: the author-baseline (a hand-coded prior), the language-model panel (nine models from eight labs scoring blind), and human anchors (a planned blind subset). The published score is the median across whatever raters a cell has.
Composite / declared / behavioural lens: The three scoring perspectives. Composite is the default (every cell); declared reads the manifesto-stated position; behavioural reads the vote-and-action record. Declared and behavioural are stored only where rhetoric and record meaningfully diverge — elsewhere a lens falls back to composite. See also Lens.
Status — settled / contested / provisional: A cell's resolution status, set by how far the raters spread. Settled = the panel broadly agrees; contested = it disagrees materially; provisional = too few ratings to call. Shown beside the median so a tight score and a shaky one don't read the same.
MAD (mean absolute deviation): The average absolute distance of each rater's score from the cell median, on the −10..+10 scale. The dispersion measure behind the status and agreement figures: low MAD means the panel converged.
Agreement: A 0–1 consensus figure reported per cell, computed as 1 − MAD/10. 1.0 means the raters landed on the same number; lower values flag a cell the panel saw differently.
Rounds (r1 / r1b / r2): Scoring passes. r1 is a locked two-model "before" with no axis definitions, kept only to measure whether the rubric moved the scores (excluded from the published median); r1b expands that no-definitions run to the full panel; r2 is the live panel — nine models scored with the axis definitions and the declared/behavioural rule. A separate grounded pilot scored a model directly from cited documents.
Krippendorff's α: A standard inter-rater reliability coefficient (0 = chance agreement, 1 = perfect), robust to missing data and usable on ordinal scores. Reported as the panel's reliability ceiling; the formal multi-model α over r2 lands once coverage is broad enough to be representative.
Grounded vs parametric: Two ways a model can score. Parametric = from the model's own trained knowledge; grounded = reading a supplied document and citing spans from it. The gap between the two on the same cells is one of the things the dataset measures.
Applicability (blank vs zero): A blank cell means the axis does not apply to that actor, so no score is shown; a zero means the axis applies and the actor scored at the centre. The two are kept distinct so "not measured" is never read as "moderate."
Scope (universal / scoped): Which actors an axis applies to. Universal axes apply everywhere; scoped axes apply only to a subset (e.g. Israel-specific, monarchy-specific, or Arab-actor axes), so an actor is scored only on the axes that make sense for it.
Inclusion gate: The rule deciding which axes enter an actor's aggregate position: backbone axes (broadly applicable) are pooled into the headline read, while peripheral or scope-limited axes are reported but held out of the summary so sparse axes don't distort it.
Cleavage: A comparative-politics term for a durable social division that structures political conflict (religious–secular, centre–periphery, sect, class). Tayyar's axes are chosen to capture the cleavages that actually organise MENA politics rather than importing a Western left–right frame wholesale.

MENA

16 terms

Arab Spring: The wave of uprisings across MENA in 2010-2012: Tunisia (Dec 2010), Egypt (Jan 2011), Libya (Feb 2011), Syria (Mar 2011), Yemen (Jan 2011), Bahrain (Feb 2011). Outcomes varied widely from democratic transition (Tunisia, since reversed) to civil war (Syria, Yemen, Libya) to consolidated autocracy (Egypt).
Axis of resistance: A self-described regional coalition centered on Iran: Hezbollah (LB), Hamas + PIJ (PS), Houthis (YE), various Iraqi Shia militias, and the Assad-era Syrian state. Opposed to US / Israeli regional posture and to Saudi / Emirati alignment. The 2024 Israeli-Hezbollah war and Assad regime fall significantly weakened it.
Hirak: Algerian for "movement"; refers to the popular protest movement that forced Bouteflika out in 2019 and continued challenging the military-backed political establishment. Tebboune's 2019 election and Hirak's subsequent suppression are still active political memory.
Intifada: Arabic for "uprising" or "shaking off"; in Palestinian-Israeli context refers specifically to the First Intifada (1987-1993) and the Second / al-Aqsa Intifada (2000-2005). The 2023-present Gaza war is sometimes called the Third Intifada by some observers but is more typically described as a war.
Joint List: An electoral alliance of Arab-majority parties in Israel that ran in the 2015, 2019 (twice), and 2020 Knesset elections. Broke up before the 2022 election. Member parties (Hadash, Ta'al, Balad, Ra'am) are now extra-parliamentary or fragmenting; a reunification is rumored on the Pulse feed.
Knesset: The Israeli unicameral parliament; 120 seats, elected by proportional representation with a 3.25% threshold.
Maghreb: The western Arab world: Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Mauritania. Distinct political tradition from the Mashriq (eastern Arab world); often analyzed as a separate sub-region.
Mashriq: The eastern Arab world: Egypt, Sudan, Levant (Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Palestine, Israel), Iraq, Arabian Peninsula. The political center of gravity for much of Arab politics.
Muhasasa: Arabic for "apportionment"; the sectarian / ethnic power-sharing system that allocates offices by community — Lebanon's confessional formula (Maronite president, Sunni PM, Shia speaker) and Iraq's post-2003 muhasasa ta'ifia. Stabilising and gridlock-producing in equal measure; the sectarianism and federalism axes engage with it.
Pan-Arabism: The ideology that the Arabic-speaking peoples form one nation that should be politically unified or closely aligned. Peaked with Nasser and Ba'athism mid-century; the pan-Arab axis scores how strongly an actor still subscribes to it versus a state-first nationalism.
Nakba: Arabic for "catastrophe"; refers to the 1948 displacement of approximately 750,000 Palestinians during the establishment of the State of Israel. Foundational to Palestinian political identity; remembered annually on May 15.
Sahwa: Arabic for "awakening"; the Islamist religious revival across the Sunni Muslim world from roughly the 1970s onward. Brotherhood-affiliated parties (FJP Egypt, Ennahda Tunisia, etc) are part of this current; Salafi parties are usually treated as distinct.
Sharia: Islamic religious law, derived from the Quran, hadith, and jurisprudential consensus. Constitutional incorporation of sharia is one of the most contested questions in MENA politics; the state-religion axis captures variance on this.
Sufi orders: Mystical Islamic brotherhoods. Several have political weight in MENA: the Khatmiyya order anchors the Sudanese DUP; the Tijaniyya is influential in Mauritania and Morocco.
Ulama: Arabic for "scholars"; the body of religious scholars in Sunni Islam (the Shia equivalent is the marja'iyya). State engagement with the ulama — whether co-opting them (Al-Azhar in Egypt, religious councils in Gulf states) or operating without them — is a major political dimension.
Wilayat al-faqih: Persian / Arabic for "guardianship of the jurist"; the Iranian political doctrine that places the senior Shia jurist in supreme political authority. Held by Hezbollah and some Iraqi Shia parties (State of Law, Hikma); rejected by quietist marjas like Ayatollah al-Sistani.