The checklists
The frameworks from the definitions page, reduced to their testable elements. Before using them, reread the one rule that governs them all: they answer different questions, and a case can pass one while failing another without contradiction. Full prose treatment and sourcing for each framework is on the definitions page; every framework below links its source, and the same data drives the assessment tools, so what you read here is exactly what you score there.
Robert O. Paxton: the behavioral definition
- Obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood
- Compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity
- A mass party of committed nationalist militants
- Uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites
- Abandonment of democratic liberties
- Redemptive violence without ethical or legal restraint
- Goals of internal cleansing
- Goals of external expansion
Built to test: Testing what a formation does rather than what it says, with the elite-collaboration mechanism at the center.
Misuse: Treating any three of eight elements as a verdict. Paxton offers a working description of fascist behavior taken together, not a threshold score.
Paxton's stage model asks a further, separate question of any case, which is where in the process it sits, rooting, arrival, exercise, or radicalization.
Roger Griffin: the palingenetic core
- A mythic core of national rebirth
- Framed against a narrative of national decadence
- Revolutionary: a new order, not restoration of an old one
- Carried by populist ultranationalism
Built to test: Isolating the fascist minimum, the one mythic core shared by every genuine fascism.
Misuse: Finding rebirth rhetoric and skipping the revolutionary-order requirement, which is where most candidate cases fail. Griffin himself applies the test restrictively.
All four elements are required on Griffin's test. Restorationist nostalgia, however authoritarian, sorts as para-fascism or reaction, not fascism.
Stanley G. Payne: the typological description
- Anti-liberalism The first negation.
- Anti-communism The second negation, and historically the constitutive one.
- Anti-conservatism The third negation, and the one popular usage forgets.
- Goal of a nationalist authoritarian new state
- Goal of a regulated, integrated economic structure
- Goal of empire or radical change in the nation's status
- Mass mobilization with militarization of politics
- Aesthetics and liturgy of violence and will
- Extreme stress on the masculine principle and youth
- Charismatic, personal style of command
Built to test: Sorting historical cases with a precise, testable checklist of negations, goals, and style.
Misuse: Weighting all items equally and announcing a score. The negations alone are common to many non-fascist formations.
Michael Mann: cleansing nation-statism through paramilitarism
- Transcendence: the claim to rise above class conflict
- Cleansing: enemies defined out of the nation
- Nation-statism: worship of state power
- Paramilitarism: organized political violence as method and value
Built to test: Putting organized violence at the center, which is empirically well-grounded in the interwar cases.
Misuse: Applying it where organized political violence is absent and calling near misses close enough. Absent paramilitarism, the case is outside Mann's category.
Umberto Eco: the fourteen features of Ur-Fascism
- Cult of tradition
- Rejection of modernism
- Action for action's sake
- Disagreement treated as treason
- Fear of difference
- Appeal to a frustrated middle class
- Obsession with a plot
- Enemies simultaneously too strong and too weak
- Life as permanent warfare
- Contempt for the weak
- Cult of heroism and death
- Machismo and sexual anxiety
- Selective populism against parliaments
- Impoverished language
Built to test: Capturing the feel and texture of the thing; intuitive, popular, and good with fuzzy cases.
Misuse: The most common of any framework, treating a handful of matches, which most authoritarian and some democratic politics produce, as a classification. Treat a high count as a prompt for the other frameworks, not a verdict.
Eco's own caveat is the tool's, since several features can coagulate into fascism, and several features also appear in politics that is not fascism.
Jason Stanley: the ten pillars of fascist politics
- The mythic past
- Propaganda
- Anti-intellectualism
- Unreality
- Hierarchy
- Victimhood
- Law and order politics
- Sexual anxiety
- Appeals to the heartland
- Dismantling of public goods and unions
Built to test: Describing fascist politics independent of regime type, which is the live question in contemporary debates.
Misuse: Classifying a regime with it, a misuse its author disavows. A high tally is a claim about tactics in use, and nothing else.
Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way: competitive authoritarianism
- Capture or purge of referee institutions: courts, prosecutors, inspectors, agencies
- State power used to punish critics and reward allies
- Systematic pressure on media
- Pressure on universities and civil society
- Electoral machinery pressured while elections remain competitive
- Real possibility that incumbents lose power through elections
Built to test: Classifying hybrid regimes in which elections are genuine but incumbents systematically abuse state power.
Misuse: Reading it as a fascism framework. It is a regime-type test, and its presence in any comparison encodes the possibility that the fascism question is the wrong question.
The final element distinguishes this category from full authoritarianism, and it is also what makes reversal possible.
Using them together
Run the six fascism frameworks on one case and record where they diverge; the divergence pattern is the analysis. The seventh, Levitsky and Way’s regime typology, is here because it is the standing alternative to the fascism question, and several of the scholars in the contemporary debates hold that it is the better question. The interactive assessment mechanizes the exercise, and the US module commits to three of these in advance for its own case.