The twelve phenotypes
Fixed points in the four-axis space. Everyone is placed at the one they sit nearest, from their very first battery — and told how well it actually fits.
One exception, and it is explained below: the centre point has to be genuinely close to claim you, not just closer than the rest.
All twelve
Traditional Collectivist
Solidarity with your own: strong public provision, strong obligations, and a settled moral order. You want the security of the welfare state without the cultural upheaval usually sold alongside it.
National Conservative
You believe a country is a particular people with a particular inheritance, and that both are worth defending. Authority above the nation looks like authority without accountability.
Social Democrat
You want the state to blunt the market's hardest edges, you are relaxed about social change, and you would rather bind nations into shared rules than leave them to their own devices. Force is a last resort you are sceptical anyone uses well.
Sovereign Populist
The state should protect its own — its industries, its workers, its way of life — and answer to nobody outside. You are economically interventionist and culturally rooted, a combination the old left-right line cannot express at all.
Peace Traditionalist
Rooted at home and reluctant abroad. You hold to inherited values and see foreign adventures as other people's children dying for other people's arguments.
Cosmopolitan Centrist
Pragmatic and outward-looking. You take each question on its merits, distrust grand theories in every direction, and lean toward cooperation simply because it usually works better.
Realist Hawk
You judge the world as it is, not as it should be. Power is the currency of international life, deterrence keeps a worse peace than idealism ever has, and treaties matter only where someone can enforce them.
Libertarian
Leave people alone. You are suspicious of concentrated power wherever it sits — in a treasury, a pulpit or a general staff — and you would rather tolerate a bad choice freely made than a good one imposed.
Green Globalist
Some problems are the planet's and cannot be solved one country at a time. You are willing to bind your own nation into rules it dislikes, because the alternative is everyone free-riding toward a shared loss.
The Unplaced
You sit close to the world's centre of gravity on every axis. That can mean genuine balance, deliberate scepticism of all four framings, or simply that these questions have not yet forced a choice out of you.
Market Liberal
Open markets, open borders, open lives. You trust exchange over direction — of goods, of people, of ideas — and you are more worried about states overreaching than about firms doing so.
Liberal Internationalist
You think rights are universal and that meaning it sometimes requires acting on it. International institutions should have teeth, and a world that watches atrocity without moving has chosen a side.
How placement works
Each phenotype is a fixed coordinate on the four axes. Your position is compared to all twelve and you are placed at the nearest — which means everybody gets a label whether or not one really suits them. So the distance is published as a fit percentage, and if the runner-up is nearly as close you are told that instead of being handed a confident answer the geometry does not support.
The Unplaced is the one exception. It sits at the centre of the space, which would otherwise make it the nearest point for anyone moderate on every axis rather than only for the genuinely undecided — on our test populations it came out larger than any real phenotype. So it has to be close to win, not merely closest: within about twenty points of centre on all four axes. Beyond that you are placed at the nearest real phenotype, with the low fit that placement has earned.
Political identity is exactly the domain where a system should not pretend to more certainty than it has.