How it works — 2 of 7

Actors & personas

Before a country can take part in a run, the platform has to know who its decision-makers are and how they are likely to think. That comes from a research pipeline that builds a two-layer persona for every actor: an institutional mandate first, a personal profile on top of it.

The pipeline starts with a country report, then a dedicated research pass on the organizations that run the country — ministries, agencies and legislative bodies, the state-owned enterprises and sovereign funds, and the commanding heights of the economy outside the state: the companies and business groups the country actually depends on. From that report the platform extracts institutions — every one the report actually confirms, not a fixed catalogue it tries to fill out — and targeted web searches then go looking for whatever the report left out. Institution by institution, it identifies the people who run them: the head, deputies, and, for collegial bodies such as parliamentary committees or councils, the named members.

A private company is marked as such, and that marking matters. It never counts toward whether a country's state apparatus is complete, and its leaders cannot reach for instruments only a state has — sanctions, tariffs, interest rates, troop postures. They argue, they meet, they speak publicly, and they are ranked into a run by how much the scenario actually concerns them.

Each person identified this way is then enriched from public sources: Wikidata supplies biographical facts (positions held, party, education), public sanctions and politically-exposed-person registries add a screening record, and a further research pass summarizes goals, agenda, ideology and influence from the same trail. The pipeline keeps source records and fetch timing where the source provides them. That is a provenance trail for the dossier, but it is not yet a guarantee that every individual sentence has its own fact-level citation — an important distinction when reading the profile.

That research becomes a persona in two layers. The first, institutional layer is the actor's mandate: the goals and red lines that come with the office itself, regardless of who holds it. The second, personal layer sits on top and modulates how that mandate gets carried out — biography, goals, and a set of belief vectors built from the same research. The institutional layer is always applied before the personal one: an actor is first a foreign minister or a central banker, and only second the particular person who happens to hold that job.

The same distinction carries into committees: when an institution has more than one decision-maker, it deliberates as a body, and each member brings both layers of their persona to the table.

flowchart TD
    accTitle: Actor persona layers
    accDescr: An institutional mandate is combined with a personal profile and belief vectors to form the persona used by an actor.
    A[Institutional mandate: goals and red lines tied to the office] --> B[Personal profile: biography, goals, influence]
    B --> C[Belief vectors distilled from the same research]
    C --> D[Persona used when the actor answers]