Estonian Political Compass
The page analyses the manifestos of Estonian political parties over the last three national elections. It uses the MARPOR coding system & categories, or at least the ones that affect a left/right socio-economic compass.
As an immigrant, I found some of the parties and their stances a bit confusing, so made this project to clear things up for me. Perhaps it will help you too (and/or perhaps I will alienate everyone in Estonia). One of my aims was to use Claude's judgement rather than my own, so that my preferences don't infect the results too much.
I used Claude Opus 4.5 in research mode to look for a good political manifesto scoring system, which is where I learnt about MARPOR. We adapted that to say if each category had a neutral, small, or large effect on left/right social or economic axes. We removed all categories that were neutral/neutral. There was a small amount of debate but I basically let Claude have its way for each if I didn't persuade it directly, because I'd like this project to be largely about Claude's judgement rather than mine.
I then used research mode to find which parties have run in at least one of the past three national elections, then to find their manifestos if available. If not available, to try to piece them together from news reports and analysis at the time.
I then created a Claude project, uploaded all the manifestos or summaries thereof, and asked in a fresh conversation for each for scoring of the manifesto with the adjusted MARPOR criteria. If the manifesto strongly agreed with the criteria, it is scored higher for that category. Claude then wrote a summary essay for each party, including the scoring.
Finally, I used Claude Code to create the app, going through various iterations until I was happy with it, then did some back and forth between projects (I have another CC project for the website) until it worked well on the site. The whole process took perhaps 15 hours.
A couple of manifestos are missing, so I used secondary sources. If you have the full 2019 Eesti 200, 2019 Free Party, or 2015 Green manifesto, I'd love if you could send it to me. And I'm not sure if they actually exist, but I'm also interested in the EÜVP 2015 & 2019 manifestos.
Right, that's enough of writing the word "manifestos" which I'm sure should really be pluralised "manifestoes".
Some thoughts for the future
- The app doesn't work too well on mobile, I should fix that
- What's a party's stance on e.g. the EU? Defence spending? Ukraine? Nuclear Power? Perhaps this could be answered by LLM.
- What's the correlation between x/y axis and vote share?
- What are the main differences between party x and y?
- How many manifesto promises did this party actually implement if they were in power?