The Political Drake Equation

A simple calculator for comparing UK political parties by more than policy alignment alone. Enter your scores, decide how much each parameter matters to you, and compare the results as relative rankings.

No data leaves this pageThis file uses only local browser calculations. It has no server, analytics, cookies, or storage.
Policies are only one parameterTrust, ability, behaviour, evidence, and respect can matter just as much as manifesto agreement.
Use it as self-analysisYou can use it to help your choices if you want, or just as a structured way to notice your own assumptions.

1. Choose the election context

This only changes the default party list. You can still switch parties on or off manually. Westminster options include national parties where they field Westminster candidates : the SNP and Plaid Cymru are options here, but some Northern Irish parties are not.

The ranking is unchanged. This only changes the chart scale.
Customise parties

Major UK and regional parties are available here. Northern Ireland parties are included only for the Northern Ireland context by default, but you can include them elsewhere manually.

2. Estimate the Policies score

Use a policy matcher for a rough numerical anchor. If a quiz gives 74 %, enter 7.4 for that party’s Policies score. Then adjust if you think the quiz missed something important.

3. Set parameter importance

Set importance to zero to ignore a parameter, or ten to maximise its importance. In the next panel you can set how much you agree with each party on the different parameters.

4. Score each party

Scores run from 0 to 10. A score of 1 is the neutral lower value used by the weighting formula; a score of 0 means “absolutely not”, provided the parameter matters to you.

V = judgement × priorities

5. Compare results

The "raw score" is in arbitrary units and basically means sod all. It's much more useful to compare the relative rankings of each party.

?

No scores yet

Add at least one party to see a result.

Rank Party Raw score % of maximum % of leader

Bar chart

Scale: percentage of the theoretical maximum possible score under your current importance settings.

6. Method and parameter descriptions

These are deliberately subjective. The point is to make your subjective judgement explicit enough to inspect it.

For each non-ignored parameter: factor = 1 + ((score − 1) / 10) × importance. Final score = product of factors. Displayed percentage = final score / product(1 + 0.9 × importance) × 100.

7. Output a summary

Generate a local text summary you can copy, print, or download. Nothing is uploaded or stored.

Summary controls

Use this to keep a snapshot of the calculation without saving anything in the browser.

  • The downloaded text file is created locally.
  • Exported JSON can be re-imported into this page later.
  • There is no automatic browser storage.