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On the political system
On the political system
OK, here's my distillation, into One Grand Post, of my understanding of how the political system works. I feel like I've got a pretty good handle on it now, I hope by distilling all this into one post I can help others get their head around it. I'm sure there are some errors here, but I feel good that it's close.
In the beginning, there were Ideologies.
If you look on your population display, you can see that every POP group has a certain 'ideology' breakdown - so many conservative, so many liberal, and so forth and so on. Figuring out why your POPs have the ideologies they do is out of the scope of this essay
, let's just start from there.
For example, let's look at two different groups of POPs:
the 7124 Mexican aristocrats of Boise, who are largely conservative:
and the 144 Farmers of Nogales, who are largely liberal.
From ideologies to issues
Every ideology has a set of Issues that it cares about, some more than others. This is a many-many mapping - every ideology has many issues, and an issue can be held by more than one ideology (for example, earlier in my game, "Jingoism" and "Moralism" were held by all ideologies).
The "Dominant Issues" pie charts summarizes this for you. For example, you can see that 21% of the Boise aristocrats care about "Pro Military", 12% care about "Jingoism", etc, while with the Nogales farmers the dominant issues are "Trinket Pensions" and "Protectionism". (By the way, it seems that as the game progresses more and more issues come to play, the "pie charts" tend to be a lot simpler at the start, but I don't have enough evidence yet to be certain about this).
From issues to parties
Your country has a set of parties - for example, right now Mexico has 7. Each one has its own primary ideology, that determines the little colored circle next to the party - blue for conservative, yellow for liberal, etc. Parties may also have a secondary ideology, for example you can get a party that is primarily liberal but secondarily socialist - you will usually see this reflected in the name (e.g. "The Socialist Liberals").
Each one has its own set of issues, think of it as its 'party platform':
How did the party choose its platform? I believe this is done just like how POPs chose their ideology - the party sees the set of issues that their primary ideology cares about (and some from its secondary ideology, if that applies), and then picks exactly one Trade one, one Economic one, etc. This is how (a) you can have multiple parties with the same primary ideology, but with different platforms - they picked different subsets from the smorgasbord, and (b) you can have a party of the same primary ideology as a POP, and yet not get their vote - it picked a relatively unimportant subset of issues, while some other party, perhaps even of some other primary ideology, picked a more important subset. [EDIT from much later: turns out this is not the case, the party issues are hard-wired in a text file under the 'countries' subdirectory of your install. Oh well]
The party platform is important in two ways: firstly, if that party becomes the 'ruling' party, it's policies will determine, well, policy - the 'Trade policy' will determine min/max tax and tariff rates, the 'Economic policy' will determine your control over factory building, etc.. secondly, the party platform determines the popularity of the party (and hence how likely it is that that platform will become in power). Which leads us to....
From parties to citizen preference
If you go back to the population page, you will see an "Electorate Vote" pie chart that shows the populace preferences for parties - here it is for all of Mexico:
How was this determined? It seems to be determined by three things:
This is all nicely summarized for you in the 'Electorate vote' pie chart
above, just below the 'Ideology' chart. For example, this pie chart, which represents all of Mexico, shows the "Partido Conservador" with a comfortable plurality of 28%, the "Partido Moderado" in second with 18%, etc.
From citizen preference to voter preference
One small but important point - these pie charts tell you the voter preferences of all pops in that demographic. Depending on your citizenship requirements for voting, and the class/wealth requirements (the 'voter franchise' reform)
, the voter preference of the voting class may be significantly different.
The effect of election events
In your election campaign, you will be presented with a set of events. These events will choose to modify the issues in a particular province. From the explanation above, we can see that what this does is "nudge" the party preferences a bit (because by changing the issues, you change the attractiveness of the party platforms). In a large country with lots of provinces, this will have very little effect, but in a small country, this can be dramatic.
From voter preference to election result
OK, we're almost done! There are now (at most) two elections that get held - one for the Lower House (this determines the ruling party, and hence the trade/taxation/industrial policies), and one for the Upper House (this determines whether you can enact Political/Social reforms).
Let's take each in turn:
The upper house
What happens here is determined by, naturally enough, the 'Upper House' political reform
At 'ruling party only', whoever wins the lower house wins the upper house - the end.
At 'appointed', you get to choose which party wins the upper house - the end.
At 'two per state', there are a series of elections held, and in each state the top two winners each get a seat.
At 'based on population', the upper house becomes like the lower house - i haven't done this yet, so I won't talk much about it.
The lower house
The lower house election results are heavily determined by the 'voting system' political reform
There are some number of election races - unclear how many. But don't think about it as a single national election, think about it as 500 elections scattered across the country (like the USA house of representatives).
Under 'first past the post', whoever wins that 1-of-500-elections wins the seat - the end. This means that narrow pluralities, if constant across the country, can result in enormous landslide victories - this is exactly what happened in this AAR.
Under 'Jefferson method', and especially 'proportional', more weighting is given to minority parties. I don't know the exact algorithm employed, but that's the effect.
And we're done!
OK, so to summarize:
Just tell me what to do to get a different ruling party
Putting all the above together, here are the steps you can take to get a different ruling party, let's call it the "Shiny Party".
your obedient servant,
-badger ken
On the political system
OK, here's my distillation, into One Grand Post, of my understanding of how the political system works. I feel like I've got a pretty good handle on it now, I hope by distilling all this into one post I can help others get their head around it. I'm sure there are some errors here, but I feel good that it's close.
In the beginning, there were Ideologies.
If you look on your population display, you can see that every POP group has a certain 'ideology' breakdown - so many conservative, so many liberal, and so forth and so on. Figuring out why your POPs have the ideologies they do is out of the scope of this essay
, let's just start from there.For example, let's look at two different groups of POPs:
the 7124 Mexican aristocrats of Boise, who are largely conservative:
and the 144 Farmers of Nogales, who are largely liberal.
From ideologies to issues
Every ideology has a set of Issues that it cares about, some more than others. This is a many-many mapping - every ideology has many issues, and an issue can be held by more than one ideology (for example, earlier in my game, "Jingoism" and "Moralism" were held by all ideologies).
The "Dominant Issues" pie charts summarizes this for you. For example, you can see that 21% of the Boise aristocrats care about "Pro Military", 12% care about "Jingoism", etc, while with the Nogales farmers the dominant issues are "Trinket Pensions" and "Protectionism". (By the way, it seems that as the game progresses more and more issues come to play, the "pie charts" tend to be a lot simpler at the start, but I don't have enough evidence yet to be certain about this).
From issues to parties
Your country has a set of parties - for example, right now Mexico has 7. Each one has its own primary ideology, that determines the little colored circle next to the party - blue for conservative, yellow for liberal, etc. Parties may also have a secondary ideology, for example you can get a party that is primarily liberal but secondarily socialist - you will usually see this reflected in the name (e.g. "The Socialist Liberals").
Each one has its own set of issues, think of it as its 'party platform':
How did the party choose its platform? I believe this is done just like how POPs chose their ideology - the party sees the set of issues that their primary ideology cares about (and some from its secondary ideology, if that applies), and then picks exactly one Trade one, one Economic one, etc. This is how (a) you can have multiple parties with the same primary ideology, but with different platforms - they picked different subsets from the smorgasbord, and (b) you can have a party of the same primary ideology as a POP, and yet not get their vote - it picked a relatively unimportant subset of issues, while some other party, perhaps even of some other primary ideology, picked a more important subset. [EDIT from much later: turns out this is not the case, the party issues are hard-wired in a text file under the 'countries' subdirectory of your install. Oh well
]The party platform is important in two ways: firstly, if that party becomes the 'ruling' party, it's policies will determine, well, policy
- the 'Trade policy' will determine min/max tax and tariff rates, the 'Economic policy' will determine your control over factory building, etc.. secondly, the party platform determines the popularity of the party (and hence how likely it is that that platform will become in power). Which leads us to....From parties to citizen preference
If you go back to the population page, you will see an "Electorate Vote" pie chart that shows the populace preferences for parties - here it is for all of Mexico:
How was this determined? It seems to be determined by three things:
- The placidity of the population - the lower the CONsciousness of your POPs, the more likely they will prefer the party in power, no matter whether it shares their ideology or not.
- The 'political parties' political reform -
- this determines how much of an 'incumbency bump' is given to the party in power. - The popularity of the party platform - remember how each party picked a set of campaign issues? By dot-producting the importance of those issues to the voters with the party platforms, you get a first cut at the voter preferences for each party. For example, in the above, a party gets 12.7 "points" if it's got "jingoism", 8.2 "points" if it's got "pro-military", etc. Modify this by the 'incumbency bump' (e.g. if you are the ruling party, and you get a 10% bump for that, instead of getting 12.7 points for "jingosim" you get 12.7*1.10), and by the 'placidity bump', and you get the 'electorate vote' numbers.
This is all nicely summarized for you in the 'Electorate vote' pie chart
above, just below the 'Ideology' chart. For example, this pie chart, which represents all of Mexico, shows the "Partido Conservador" with a comfortable plurality of 28%, the "Partido Moderado" in second with 18%, etc.
From citizen preference to voter preference
One small but important point - these pie charts tell you the voter preferences of all pops in that demographic. Depending on your citizenship requirements for voting, and the class/wealth requirements (the 'voter franchise' reform)
, the voter preference of the voting class may be significantly different.The effect of election events
In your election campaign, you will be presented with a set of events. These events will choose to modify the issues in a particular province. From the explanation above, we can see that what this does is "nudge" the party preferences a bit (because by changing the issues, you change the attractiveness of the party platforms). In a large country with lots of provinces, this will have very little effect, but in a small country, this can be dramatic.
From voter preference to election result
OK, we're almost done! There are now (at most) two elections that get held - one for the Lower House (this determines the ruling party, and hence the trade/taxation/industrial policies), and one for the Upper House (this determines whether you can enact Political/Social reforms).
Let's take each in turn:
The upper house
What happens here is determined by, naturally enough, the 'Upper House' political reform
At 'ruling party only', whoever wins the lower house wins the upper house - the end.
At 'appointed', you get to choose which party wins the upper house - the end.
At 'two per state', there are a series of elections held, and in each state the top two winners each get a seat.
At 'based on population', the upper house becomes like the lower house - i haven't done this yet, so I won't talk much about it.
The lower house
The lower house election results are heavily determined by the 'voting system' political reform
There are some number of election races - unclear how many. But don't think about it as a single national election, think about it as 500 elections scattered across the country (like the USA house of representatives).
Under 'first past the post', whoever wins that 1-of-500-elections wins the seat - the end. This means that narrow pluralities, if constant across the country, can result in enormous landslide victories - this is exactly what happened in this AAR.
Under 'Jefferson method', and especially 'proportional', more weighting is given to minority parties. I don't know the exact algorithm employed, but that's the effect.
And we're done!
OK, so to summarize:
- Demographics determine POP ideologies
- The ideologies determine the issues of interest
- The issues of interest, combined with the party platforms, determine party preferences
- The party preferences determine election results
Just tell me what to do to get a different ruling party
Putting all the above together, here are the steps you can take to get a different ruling party, let's call it the "Shiny Party".
- Choose political events that increase the weight that POPs give to the issues that the Shiny Party has.
- If the Shiny party has more support amongst the disenfranchised, try to widen the franchise - the "Vote Franchise" reform.
- Use the "Political Parties" reform to lower the bonus that the current ruling party gets.
- Raise the CONsciousness of your POPs, this will lower another ruling party bump.
- Use the "Voting system" reform to at least increase the number of seats the Shiny party gets in the Lower House - perhaps it can use that to form a coalition.
your obedient servant,
-badger ken
Last edited:
...Am I the only one who sees something amiss with the idea of socialist aristocrats?
thanks for the thanks! Glad you enjoyed it!
Think Kennedy or Roosevelt
badger_ken: ...Think Kennedy or Roosevelt
while i agree with the choice of FDR, (but NOT Teddy !), Kennedy was American to the core. after all, he taught us that tax cuts was the only government program that "pays for itself"...
that said, you could have included LBJ on your list
lastly, i would like to see a continuance of this AAR incorporating the lessons learned...
while i agree with the choice of FDR, (but NOT Teddy !), Kennedy was American to the core. after all, he taught us that tax cuts was the only government program that "pays for itself"...
that said, you could have included LBJ on your list
lastly, i would like to see a continuance of this AAR incorporating the lessons learned...
Just started this game myself, you've certainly given me a lot to incorporate into my own game as Argentina. Great AAR!