Pole A: Public score 0
Essential goods held by the community. Common argument for it: what is essential should not depend on profit, and collective ownership spreads the gains.
POLITICAL POSITION · DIMENSION 7 OF 12
Ownership: public or private
Ownership is the dimension that records who a person thinks should own the means of production and essential services.
What it is
Ownership is the dimension that records who a person thinks should own the means of production and essential services. At the Public pole, strategic companies, infrastructure and services such as health and energy belong to the State or the community; at the Private pole, they belong to people and companies, and the State regulates without owning.
What the dimension covers
- State-owned companies, privatization and nationalization
- public health, education, energy and sanitation services
- ownership of land and natural resources
- cooperatives and other collective forms of ownership
The two poles
0 · PublicPrivate · 100
Pole B: Private score 100
Goods held by people and companies. Common argument for it: owners have an incentive to maintain and invest, and competition between owners improves the service.
How the instrument measures it
The Evidence instrument (schema evidence-pol-1) records this dimension as a number from 0 to 100: 0 is the Public pole, 100 is the Private pole. The number comes from your answers to the questionnaire or from a result imported from another instrument by URL; either way it is a self-assessment, computed in your browser, and nothing reaches the server without an explicit action from you. With no answer for this dimension, it stays unknown (UNKNOWN), never 50.
| No. | Statement | Agreeing points to |
|---|---|---|
| 7 | State-owned companies should be sold to private firms whenever the private sector can run the service. | Private |
| 19 | Sectors such as energy, water and sanitation should stay with public companies. | Public |
| 31 | Private management usually uses resources more efficiently than public management. | Private |
| 43 | Health care and education should be provided mainly by the state, free of charge. | Public |
Formula p = (resposta - 1) / 4 if agreeing points to Private; p = 1 - (resposta - 1) / 4 if it points to Public; placar = 100 * media(p)
There are 4 original statements, with opposite directions to reduce the effect of agreeing with everything. Answers run from 1 to 5 (1 Strongly disagree, 2 Disagree, 3 Neither agree nor disagree, 4 Agree, 5 Strongly agree); "Don't know" does not score. Each answer becomes a position between 0 and 1, the score is the mean position times 100, and confidence combines coverage (how many of the 4 statements scored) and consistency (how far answers point the same way): high from 0.75, medium from 0.50.
In the Evidence portable format, this dimension is the ownership parameter of the profile URL. Scale, evidence states and limitations are in the instrument method; the terms are in the glossary.
Why it is a separate dimension
It differs from Economic coordination: there the question is who decides prices and quantities, the plan or the market; here it is who owns. There are State-owned companies that compete in markets and private companies under price controls, which is why the two questions are separate.
Compare with Economic coordination and Foreign trade.
Frequently asked questions
Are Ownership and Economic coordination not just left and right?
Together they cover much of what is called the economic left and right axis. The instrument keeps them apart because answers can diverge: one can prefer private companies under heavy planning, or State-owned companies in open competition.
Does the score say anything about the Brazilian economy?
No. It describes the respondent's preference on a date. Projects such as the Manifesto Project measure party positions from election programs, which is a different object.
What does a score of 50 on Ownership mean?
That the answers ended halfway between Public and Private, through balance or through a mix of answers in both directions. It is not the same as moderation or the political center, and it says nothing about the other 11 dimensions.
Is my result sent or published?
No. The computation runs in your browser, nothing reaches the server without an explicit action from you, and the result page is not indexed by search engines. Political opinion is sensitive personal data under Brazil's LGPD (art. 5, II, and art. 11).
Literature and references
- Property and OwnershipStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: justifications of private and collective property.
- SocialismStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: social ownership of the means of production and its variants.
- Manifesto Project (WZB)Coding of party programs in dozens of countries, with economic positions by topic.
Reference readings on the topic. None of them validates the Evidence instrument, and no text, question or weight was copied from them.
Conceptual sources of the instrument
Who should own the means of production and essential services: the state (public) or private firms (private).
Other dimensions
- Related dimensionEconomic coordinationPlanning · Free market
- Related dimensionForeign tradeProtectionism · Globalism
- PreviousForeign interventionNon-interventionist · Nationalist
- NextEconomic coordinationPlanning · Free market