Knowledge Atlas · Reference

Glossary & ontology

Terms are defined once and translated with care — terminology must survive translation intact.

Agonism: A strand of democratic theory holding that political conflict is ineliminable and should be channelled between adversaries who respect shared rules, rather than aimed at rational consensus.
AI dividend: A proposal to distribute part of the returns from AI and automated production to members of a community.
Algocracy: A system in which algorithms structure and constrain how people act and take part in decisions, distinct from markets (which use prices) and bureaucracies (which use rules).
Algorithmic accountability: The obligation of those who deploy algorithmic systems to explain, justify and answer for their effects.
Anchor institution: A large, place-based organisation such as a hospital, university or local authority that is unlikely to relocate and whose employment and purchasing shape the local economy.
Arbitration: Resolving a dispute by an arbitrator the parties have agreed to, whose award is binding on them.
Arrow's impossibility theorem: Kenneth Arrow's result that, with three or more options, no rule turning individual rankings into a group ranking can satisfy a short list of fairness conditions at once without making someone a dictator.
Automated decision-making: Decisions about people made by technological means without meaningful human involvement.
Automation bias: The tendency of people to over-rely on automated recommendations, even when they are wrong.

Balanced job complex: In participatory economics, a bundle of tasks for each worker arranged so that empowering, conceptual work and rote work are shared and no one monopolises the former.
Bicameral sortition: A legislative design that pairs an elected chamber with a chamber of randomly selected citizens, each able to initiate and vote on legislation.

Charter city: A new city created under a special charter whose rules differ from those of the host country.
Checks and balances: Institutional arrangements that let each branch or level of government limit the others, so that no single body can exercise power unchecked.
Citizens' assembly: A body of randomly selected residents who learn about an issue, deliberate and make recommendations.
Citizens' Initiative Review: A panel of randomly selected voters that studies a ballot measure, hears advocates and experts, and writes a statement for other voters.
Civil disobedience: A public, non-violent and conscientious breach of law undertaken to bring about a change in laws or government policy, usually with willingness to accept the legal consequences.
Civil society: The sphere of voluntary associations, movements, unions, churches and media that sits between household and state and outside both government and market.
Collectivisation: Pooling of land, workshops or firms into jointly managed units. It ranges from voluntary collectives, as in revolutionary Catalonia, to state-driven campaigns in which participation was pressured or compulsory.
Common-pool resource: A resource from which it is costly to exclude users and whose use by one person reduces what is left for others — e.g. fisheries, groundwater, pastures.
Commons-based peer production: Large-scale collaboration in which many people create shared resources, such as software or encyclopedias, without market prices or managerial command.
Communalism: A term with two unrelated senses: Murray Bookchin's programme of confederated, directly democratic municipal assemblies; and, in South Asia, politics organised around religious community identity.
Communicative action: Habermas's term for social interaction oriented to reaching mutual understanding by offering reasons that others can accept or contest, as opposed to strategic action oriented to achieving one's own success.
Communitarianism: In the 19th century, 'communitarian' described people who experimented with communal living, as in Owenite and Fourierist settlements. Today the word usually names a philosophical school stressing the community's role in forming individuals.
Community land trust: A nonprofit that holds land permanently for a community and leases it to occupants who own the buildings.
Community of goods: An arrangement in which members give up private ownership of property and draw on a common stock, usually on religious grounds, modelled on the Jerusalem church described in Acts 2 and 4.
Community wealth building: A local economic development approach that tries to keep wealth circulating in a place through local ownership, finance, fair employment, progressive procurement and community use of land, usually led by anchor institutions.
Competitive governance: The idea that jurisdictions should compete for residents and firms, as companies compete for customers, to improve rules and services.
Condorcet paradox: The finding that majority preferences can be cyclic: a majority prefers A to B, another majority prefers B to C, and a third prefers C to A, so no option beats all others.
Confederation: A union of sovereign members that delegate limited functions to common institutions while keeping the right to decide most matters — and often to leave.
Consensus decision-making: A process in which a group seeks a decision every member can accept, rather than a majority vote.
Consociationalism: A model of power-sharing democracy for deeply divided societies, combining a grand coalition of group leaders, segmental autonomy, proportionality and a minority veto.
Constituent power: The power of a people or founding body to create or remake a constitution, as opposed to the 'constituted' powers that act within it.
Consul platform: Free, open-source software for citizen participation (proposals, debates, polls and participatory budgets) first built for Decide Madrid.
Cybernetic planning: Managing an economy or state as a feedback-controlled system, using computers and data networks to collect information, model outcomes and adjust decisions in near real time.
Cybernetics in governance: The use of feedback, information flows and models from cybernetics to steer organisations or economies. Chile's Project Cybersyn (1971-73) is the best-known attempt to apply the idea to a national economy.

DAO: A decentralised autonomous organisation: a group that coordinates people and funds through smart contracts, usually governed by token-holder votes.
DAO LLC: A limited liability company whose management is vested in a decentralised autonomous organisation, as permitted by Wyoming law since 2021.
Data trust: A legal structure in which independent trustees manage data on behalf of a group of people, with a fiduciary duty to them.
Decentralised arbitration: Dispute resolution run by a blockchain protocol in which crowdsourced jurors, chosen by an automated draw and paid by incentives, decide cases and their rulings are enforced by smart contracts.
Delegation (transitive): In liquid democracy, passing one's vote to a proxy who may pass it on again; revocable at any time.
Deliberative poll: A survey of a random sample taken before and after the participants receive balanced information and discuss an issue.
Democratic confederalism: A model of self-government in which local assemblies and communes federate into wider councils without a sovereign state, set out by Abdullah Öcalan in 2005 and later adopted by the Kurdish-led administration in northern Syria.
Devolution: The transfer of powers from a central government to elected regional bodies within a unitary state, by ordinary law, so that the centre keeps the legal power to change or reverse it.
Digital identity: A verifiable electronic credential that lets a person prove who they are online.
Direct democracy: A system in which citizens decide on laws and policies themselves, by assembly or referendum, rather than only electing representatives.

E-residency: A government-issued digital identity for non-residents, giving access to a country's online services without granting citizenship or the right to live there.
E-voting: Voting in which ballots are cast or counted electronically; remote Internet voting, as used in Estonia, is its most contested form.
Ekklesia: The sovereign assembly of Athenian citizens, which voted on laws, war and policy and elected certain officials.
Electoral reform assembly: A citizens' assembly convened to recommend changes to an electoral system, whose proposal may then be put to a public referendum.
Energy accounting: A proposed non-monetary system that measures production and distribution in units of energy, associated with Technocracy Inc.'s energy certificates.
Epistemic status: How well-supported a claim is: established, theory, disputed, hypothesis or forecast. Shown on every claim in the atlas.
Epistocracy: Rule or distribution of political power according to knowledge or competence, rather than by equal votes. The word means 'rule of the knowledgeable'.
Exit: Leaving an organisation or polity in response to dissatisfaction (Hirschman).

Faction: In Madison's definition, a number of citizens, whether a majority or a minority, united by a common impulse of passion or interest adverse to the rights of other citizens or to the community's permanent interests.
Federal state: A state in which constitutional authority is divided between a national government and constituent units (states, provinces, cantons or Länder), each holding powers the other cannot unilaterally remove.
Federation: A polity in which authority is constitutionally divided between a central government and constituent units, neither of which can unilaterally abolish the other.
Free-rider problem: When people can benefit from a good without paying, voluntary provision tends to fall short.
Futarchy: Governance in which voters define goals and prediction markets choose the policies expected to achieve them (Hanson).
Future generations commissioner: An independent public officer with a statutory duty to represent the interests of future generations by advising and reviewing public bodies; Wales created such an office under its 2015 Act.

General will: In Rousseau's political theory, the will of the citizens as a body aimed at the common good, which a state must follow to be legitimate; it is distinguished from the sum of private wills.
Gerrymandering: Drawing electoral district boundaries to advantage a party or group, typically by packing opponents' voters into a few districts or cracking them across many so they cannot win.
Goði (chieftain): In the Icelandic Commonwealth, the holder of a chieftaincy (goðorð) who led followers and sat in the law council; the office could be bought, shared or inherited.
Graduated sanctions: Penalties that start small for a first or minor breach of rules and escalate for repeated or serious ones.
Gross National Happiness: Bhutan's policy philosophy, credited to King Jigme Singye Wangchuck in 1972, that development should promote collective well-being across several domains and not economic output alone.
Ground lease: A long-term lease of land under which the leaseholder owns the buildings while the landowner keeps the land.

Harberger tax: A tax on self-assessed property values combined with an obligation to sell at that value to any buyer.
Human in the loop: A design in which a human must review or approve an automated system's output before it takes effect.

Initiative and referendum: Tools of direct legislation: voters propose laws or constitutional changes by petition (initiative) and approve or reject measures at the ballot (referendum).
Intentional community: A community whose members choose to live together around shared values or practices, often sharing property or work.
International zone: A territory placed under a treaty-based administration shared by several states instead of one sovereign. The Tangier Zone (1925-56) combined nominal Moroccan sovereignty with a foreign-run administration, assembly and court.
Iron law of oligarchy: Robert Michels's thesis that political parties and other large membership organisations inevitably tend to be controlled by a small leadership, whatever their democratic ideals.

Judicial review: The power of courts to assess whether laws or executive acts conflict with a constitution or higher law, and to refuse to apply them if they do.

Kibbutz: A communal settlement in Israel, traditionally with shared property and income, communal dining and decisions by a general assembly. The first, Degania, dates from 1909-10; many kibbutzim have since adopted differential, market-based pay.
Kleroterion: An Athenian allotment machine: a stone slab with rows of slots and a tube, used to select jurors and officials by lot.

Land value tax: A tax on the unimproved value of land, leaving buildings and improvements untaxed.
Landsgemeinde: An open-air assembly of all eligible citizens of a Swiss canton or district that votes on laws by show of hands.
Legibility: The degree to which a state can see, count and standardise a society — through maps, censuses, surnames and registries — in order to govern it.
Legitimacy: The belief, or the justified claim, that an authority has the right to rule and to be obeyed.
Lex mercatoria: 'Merchant law': rules and practices said to have governed medieval trade across jurisdictions.
Liberum veto: The right of any single member of the Polish Sejm to block a measure or end a session, so that legislation in practice required unanimity.
Liquid democracy: A system in which members vote directly or delegate their vote, by topic and revocably, to someone they trust.
Loyalty: Attachment to an organisation that makes members delay exit and use voice instead (Hirschman).

Majority rule: A decision rule under which the option preferred by more than half of those voting prevails. With two options it is the only rule that is anonymous, neutral and positively responsive (May's theorem).
Mandatory referendum: A popular vote that must be held automatically when a defined kind of decision is proposed, without any petition.
Median voter theorem: When voters choose by majority rule on one issue dimension and have single-peaked preferences, the option preferred by the median voter beats every alternative in a head-to-head vote.
Micronation: A self-declared entity that claims to be a sovereign state but is not recognised by established states.
Mini-public: A deliberative body, such as a citizens' assembly, chosen to be a small-scale representative sample of the public.
Mixed constitution: A constitution that combines monarchic, aristocratic and democratic elements so that each can check the others.
Mixed government: A constitution that combines elements of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy so that no single group can dominate; also called a mixed constitution.
Mutual criticism: The Oneida Community's practice in which a member sat silently while the whole community or a committee listed their faults, used as its main instrument of discipline and cohesion.
Mutualism: A form of anarchism associated with Proudhon, in which individuals and groups exchange products on the basis of mutually agreed contracts and mutual credit, without exploitation or a coercive state.

Negative income tax: A system in which people with income below a threshold receive a payment from the state that shrinks as their income rises.
Network state: An online community with a shared purpose that crowdfunds territory in many places and seeks diplomatic recognition (Srinivasan).
Non-domination: In republican political theory, freedom understood as independence from the arbitrary power of others, so that a person is unfree if someone else has the capacity to interfere in their affairs at will, even if that power is never used.

Ochlocracy: Rule by the mob; in Polybius's account, the degenerate form into which democracy decays when violence and demagogues replace law.
Off-world governance: Rules, institutions and legal authority for human activity and settlement beyond Earth, including the Moon, Mars and orbital habitats.
Oligarchy: Rule by a small number of people; in Aristotle's classification, the deviant form of rule by the few, in which the wealthy or well-born rule in their own interest.
Ostracism: An Athenian procedure by which citizens could vote to banish a prominent person for ten years without a trial and without loss of property.
Ostrom's design principles: Eight features Elinor Ostrom found in long-enduring institutions for governing common-pool resources.
Outer Space Treaty: The 1967 treaty that bars national appropriation of outer space and celestial bodies, keeps states responsible for their private space activities, and limits military use of the Moon and other bodies.