Abstract
<jats:p>This Index Methodology Paper presents the foundational methodology for the Political Credit Index (PCI), a proposed framework for measuring political credibility as strategic intangible capital. The paper argues that political credit is the accumulated credibility that allows political actors to convert future commitments into present cooperation. It distinguishes political credit from reputation, legitimacy, popularity, trust, and formal authority, and develops a seven-dimensional indicator architecture covering commitment fulfillment, policy stability, institutional procedure, social trust, distributive fairness, external commitment credibility, and narrative consistency. The paper further introduces normalization and weighting methods, scenario-specific weighting templates, potential data sources and coding strategies, political-credit valuation channels, a dynamic credit-stock model, a classification and benchmarking framework, and a scenario-based illustrative calculation. Version 1.0 is presented as a foundational release intended to establish the conceptual and methodological architecture of the PCI rather than to provide a finalized empirical dataset or country ranking.</jats:p>