Tayyar dataset

What's included

• Field-level source citations. Each fact about each entity links back to where it came from — founding year cites a different source than current leader, which cites a different source than legal status. The coverage page tracks the rollup.
• 16 calibrated axes. Economic, social, state-religion, democracy, west-alignment, regional-stance, Palestinian question, civil liberties, regime stance, pan-Arab, federalism, modernization, gender, iran-posture, press-freedom, sectarianism. Each one comes with a scoring rubric and concrete MENA examples anchored along the scale.
• Richer status than yes/no. Parties carry a government role (lead, coalition major / minor, confidence-and-supply, opposition major / minor, extra-parliamentary, banned) and a legal status (legal, restricted, outlawed, dissolved, merged away). Opposition and independent flags sit alongside.
• Declared vs. behavioral on key cases. Parties like Hezbollah and Hamas read as more committed to democracy in what they declare than in what they do; 20 parties carry a rhetoric-vs-record gap that is itself the finding. The home compass has a lens toggle to switch between views.
• 291 primary-source documents and 101 verified quotes. The document corpus carries verbatim manifestos, charters, parliamentary speeches, and UN addresses with country / party / politician attribution. The quote corpus drives Who-said-it and the "On the record" sections on every party / politician page.
• A semi-live event feed. Pulse tracks recent political shifts with a confidence rating — confirmed, reported, rumored, speculative — so in-flux developments (party formations, merger talks) can sit alongside confirmed events without being conflated. Subscribable as RSS.
• Free downloads. Every table is available as CSV or JSON at /data. No API key, no rate limit.

Cite as

Cite the paper. The dataset is in active development; a tagged snapshot pins a citation that won't shift as it evolves, and a public repository and permanent DOI are in preparation.

@unpublished{gara_tayyar_2026,
  author = {Gara, Tarek},
  title  = {The Model as One Rater Among Several: Measuring Political Positions in Data-Sparse Regions with a Language-Model Panel},
  year   = {2026},
  note   = {Preprint; arXiv ID forthcoming},
  url    = {https://tarekgara.com/tayyar/paper}
}

Gara, T. (2026). The Model as One Rater Among Several: Measuring Political Positions in Data-Sparse Regions with a Language-Model Panel [Preprint]. https://tarekgara.com/tayyar/paper

Where to read more

• Methodology — how the dataset got built and where it falls short
• Findings — the structural patterns the data shows
• Coverage — verification status, country breakdowns, special-status leaderboards
• Axes catalog — all 16 axes with correlations and per-axis stats

Downloads

Every table exportable as CSV or JSON. No auth required.

• All tables (download index)
• tayyar_parties.csv
• tayyar_politicians.csv
• tayyar_countries.csv
• tayyar_axes.csv
• tayyar_aggregate_positions.csv
• Full dataset (JSON)

What's coming next

Changes are tracked as versioned snapshots; the repository will be open-sourced under MIT on publication. The roadmap, in the order it'll land:

• Document-grounded scoring. Positions derived from reading party platforms, speeches, and voting records — with the specific passages cited. The hand-coded scores stay as the baseline; the document-grounded ones replace them as they're produced.
• Inter-rater agreement. Cohen's κ between hand-coded and document-grounded scores reported on methodology. Where they agree, the rubric's doing its job; where they don't, that's a finding worth writing up.
• Lens system at scale. Declared / behavioral / perceived rows generated for every party, not just the hand-coded marquee cases. The compass lens toggle then carries information across the whole dataset.
• Second-pass verification. Each fact and each position score reviewed against primary sources by someone other than the author.