The qualification areas

The list

Competence in governing

• Constitutional governing competence — does this person understand the machine they are asking to operate?
• Governance and constitutional law — the legal structure, and its limits on their own office.
• Management — running an organisation, which is most of what an executive office actually is.
• Policy expertise — depth in the subject matter their seat touches.

Independence

• Anti-corruption — the record on self-dealing, and on what they did when it was inconvenient.
• Not controlled or influenced — who has leverage over them, and what they have done about it.
• Loyalty to the country — where obligations lie when they conflict.

Policy areas

• Economics · Domestic policy · Foreign policy · National security

The person

• Citizens' rights — their posture toward the people they would govern.
• Intellectual rigor — whether they update, and how they handle being wrong.
• Representation and leadership — whether they can actually carry a constituency.
• Public speaking — the ability to make the argument in public.
• Great life experience — what they have actually done.

Why this shape

The list is deliberately weighted toward how somebody would govern rather than what they would decide. Roughly two thirds of the areas are about competence, independence, and character; the policy areas are a minority.

That is the movement's bet: on most questions, citizens disagree legitimately and the right answer is whatever a functioning process produces. What breaks a country is not the wrong tax rate — it is people who cannot run the office, or who answer to somebody other than the public.

The areas that are hardest to assess

Not controlled or influenced is the most important area and the one where the evidence is worst, almost by definition. A rubric here has to be written against what somebody has done under pressure, not against what can be proven about their relationships.

Economics is the area most likely to smuggle in a policy preference, and it is treated as the worked example precisely for that reason — the mechanism-and-who-pays discipline was developed there first and then applied outward.