Agreed on the importance. A thing I quickly learned-- Third Position is waayyyyyy different than Third Way. Would hate for centrism to be confused with any pseudo-fascist movement.
It's an immense project, so I had to break it out into pieces: Step 1: I started the project by putting together profiles for each country. The profiles consisted of basic info like: form of government, unicameral or bicameral legislature, freedom index, most recent constitution, etc. I just recently finished this part. Step 2: I'm currently identifying the major parties in each country by filling them into the following ideologies: Liberal, Nationalist/ Reactionary, Christian Democracy, Green, Far Leftist, Progressive/Social Democracy, Centrist, Independent, Separatist, Islamic, Republicanism, Libertarian. I decided on these categories after looking at the party structure in a number of countries and the international party organizations that currently exist (such as the International Democrat Union). Some categories remain as catch-alls, such as Far Leftism (which captures Marxists, Leninists, and most other hardcore communitarians) and Nationalist/ Reactionary (which covers fascists, extreme nationalists, and other xenophobic movements). Independent is a catch-all for independent candidates and parties that serve as containers for independents, while Republicanism is for parties that support republican or democratic governance in non-democratic countries. Step 3: After I finish that part, then I need to map out the current legislature representation by ideology. That'll be as easy as taking the current party representation and applying the ideological representation instead to the seat maps. Step 4: I will have to do some extra identification after Step 3 for, a) parties that are centrist, but aren't major parties and, b) parties that aren't self identifying as centrist, but have a platform or positions that match or correspond with that of Radical Centrism or Third Way. -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org
