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Topic: Elections

Definition: How voters choose officeholders, including who may vote, how ballots are cast and counted, and how campaigns are run.

📊 Continuum 1: Direction (Oppose ↔ Support)

Which way the belief runs, from total opposition (-100%) to total support (+100%). The Belief Score column is a separate thing: how well the belief holds up once its arguments are scored, not which way it points. A claim can sit at +100% and still score badly.

Positive means: favors making voting easier and open to more people; negative favors tighter rules on who votes and how.

💪 Continuum 2: Claim Strength, How Absolute the Claim Is (Modest ↔ Total)

How absolute the claim is, from a hedged "sometimes" to a flat "always," independent of which way it runs and of whether it is true. Two beliefs match on this axis when they are equally bold.

Key insight: The strongest arguments on either side usually live at Moderate (50%), not Total (100%). Attacking only the Total versions is a straw man. Engage the best version of the opposing argument, not the loudest.

🌳 Continuum 3: General to Specific, with Branching Subcategories (General ↔ Specific)

The same topic holds claims at every altitude, from a sweeping worldview down to one line-item policy. A general belief branches into subcategories, and each subcategory holds the specific beliefs beneath it. A belief only merges with another that shares its branch and its rung, so a worldview never gets double-counted with the policy it implies.

📜 Assumption Stack Behind Each Position

Not a fourth axis. Continuum 3 sorts beliefs by altitude; this takes each stance and lists the assumptions a person must accept to hold it, which is how a fight at the bottom gets traced to its real root higher up.

⚖ Core Values Conflict

Advertised values each side claims, and the motivation critics attribute.

⚡ The Engagement Landscape (Passive ↔ Active)

A map of who will act, not a matching axis. It measures how far a person will go to act on a belief, which is a fact about the person, not the belief, so it never feeds the three-part address above. A casual supporter and someone willing to go to prison hold the same belief.

Key insight: Engagement is independent of the three matching axes. Someone can hold a moderate claim (50%) about a cause they feel lukewarm toward (+40%) and still go to prison for it (Level 4).

🤝 Common Ground and Compromise

The scored cost-benefit trees read sideways. Compromise Candidates are the winnable disagreements, the ones a small likelihood shift can flip, as opposed to the symbolic value conflicts no negotiation resolves.

⚖ The Evidence Ledger

A highlight reel of the highest-impact evidence appearing anywhere under this topic, each side sorted by score, highest first. Evidence formally attaches to specific beliefs and is scored on its own page; this is the cross-topic view.

📏 Best Objective Criteria for This Topic

Agree on the yardstick before measuring. Each proposed criterion is a belief with its own page, scored on four dimensions: Validity (does it capture what we claim?), Reliability (do different observers get the same reading?), Linkage (how directly it connects to the claim), and Importance. Arguments that connect to high-scoring criteria carry more weight.

📚 Best Media and Resources

Every work cited on a belief page in this topic, sorted by how much it moved those pages. Quality and impact are argued on the work's own page.

🔗 Related Topics

The Children column is where full subcategories from Continuum 3 go once they outgrow a row and earn their own page.

📬 Contribute

If you would rather use git, every cell here is a row in the repository: a belief is a page row with the topic elections, and a cell on this page is an edges row with page elections and one of the topic sections.

Built from revision 42c8344, committed 2026-10-04. 2173 pages. Every number above is computed from the two tables in that revision, so a reader who fetches it gets these numbers and not different ones.