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Victoria 3 - Dev Diary #7 - Laws

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After a couple weeks vacation, we’ve now returned to our usual weekly dev diary schedule! Today we will be diving deeper into Victoria’s politics to talk about Laws. Legal reform in your country creates different political, economic, and social conditions for your Pops, which over time changes the fabric of your society. This change can be slow and incremental, or fast and revolutionary - sometimes literally.

There are three major categories of Laws with seven sub-categories in each, which themselves contain up to half a dozen specific Law options. As always everything here is being heavily iterated upon, including these sub-categories, so the laws you see at release will not exactly match what we’re telling you here!

Power Structure
These Laws determine who is in control of different aspects of your country. It includes fundamental Governance Principles such as Monarchy and Parliamentary Republic, which determine who your Head of State is and what kind of powers they wield. Distribution of Power ranges from Autocracy and Oligarchy through various extensions of the voting franchise all the way to Universal Suffrage. Citizenship and Church and State Laws govern which Pops suffer legal discrimination in your country due to their culture or religion. The principles on which your Bureaucracy is run - such as hereditary or elected positions for bureaucrats - determine how expensive it is to keep track of each citizen and how much Institutions cost to run, but also directly benefit some groups over others. Conscription lets you raise a part of your civilian workforce as soldiers in times of war, and Internal Security governs how the Home Affairs anti-insurgent Institution works.

The Power Structure Laws of a typical European nation after having made a few strides towards liberalization. The numbers in green refers to the number of alternative Laws currently available to be enacted. This indicator is used throughout the UI to reveal how many options a sub-menu has without having to open it.
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Economy
This set of Laws define where your treasury’s money comes from and how it can be spent. Your Economic System is crucial - this governs whether your country operates on principles of Mercantilism, Isolationism, or Free Trade, among others. Income Tax determines which Pops should be taxed and what range of tax burden is appropriate. No Income Tax at all is of course an option, and legislation to such effect will make some Pops both rich and happy! Poll Taxation, or levying a fixed tax per head, is another option primarily used in less industrialized societies. (There are other avenues of taxation as well, but these are the ones driven by legislation.) Finally, you can choose what form the Institutions of Colonization, Policing, Education System, and Health System will take in your country. For example, you can keep government spending under control by instituting Charity Hospitals, which have limited effect and boost the power of the clergy, or you could pass a Public Health Insurance Law which is costlier but can have a greater impact on the health of the masses.

Payroll Taxes require reasonable lower-class wages and a centralized population to pay off, but if so can form the economic basis for a budding welfare system as seen here. A tax system based on Levying might be more lucrative in countries with huge Peasant populations.
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Human Rights
Enshrining the rights of the individual was a hallmark of the era. These Laws define how your Pops are treated and what manner of control you can enforce over their lives. Free Speech determines the degree of control you can enforce over your Interest Groups but restrictive rights throttle the spread of innovation. The Labor Rights Laws include outlawing serfdom, but extends all the way to establishing a Workplace Safety Institution to reduce the number of people literally crushed in the jaws of industry. Children’s Rights and the Rights of Women have a number of effects such as shifting the Workforce/Dependent demographics, affecting Dependent income, and extending the franchise. Welfare ensures the poor and disabled in your society are taken care of. Migration Laws can be used to influence Pop migration. Slavery Laws determine the legal status of owning people in your country. More details on that subject in a future dev diary.

Not a lot of concessions have been made here, but at least children may congregate freely after the factory whistle signals the end of their grueling workday.
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Laws are almost always completely independent from one another. You can create a Constitutional Monarchy with hereditary succession but Universal Suffrage, or an Autocratic Presidential Republic with a strongman leader at the top of the food chain. You can have a Secret Police and still permit fully Protected Speech.

Our aim is to set all countries up with the best fitting Laws compared to what they actually had in 1836. This will vary wildly between countries, and will greatly influence what sorts of conditions and strategies are available to you at the start of the game. For example, the USA starts with Total Separation of Church and State, ensuring no Pops suffer legal discrimination on account of their religion, while Sardinia-Piedmont doesn’t take kindly to non-Catholic Pops. This will affect Pops who live in the country currently, but will also limit which Pops might migrate there - few Pops would make it their preference to move to a country where they’re mistreated by law.

As a result of these starting Laws Sardinia-Piedmont might have to look towards colonization or conquest if they start to run out of their native workforce, while North America is likely to get regular migration waves to help expand the frontier. By connecting these effects to starting Laws, many historically appropriate and recognizable aspects and behaviors of Victorian-era nations - such as their attractiveness to immigrants - are connected to a tangible property (e.g. poor or oppressed Pops emigrating to the USA both because of its demand for workforce and also its liberal Laws) rather than being arbitrarily encoded into the very fabric of the nation itself, the approach previous Victoria games took to encourage history in the a familiar direction.

However, these starting Laws are far from set in stone! You might want to reform your Laws to better suit the direction your society is going - for example, you might want to transition your Bureaucracy from a system of Appointees to Elected Bureaucrats in order to more effectively provide services from Government Institutions to all your incorporated territories (or maybe just because you want to disempower the otherwise powerful Intelligentsia.) Or your country’s Agrarian economy has plateaued on account of increased reliance on imports of manufactured goods, and you want to change course to the exciting opportunities provided by a Free Trade policy.

A common effect of Laws is to modify some parameter about your country, like give you more Authority or reduce certain Pops’ Mortality. But Laws can also permit or disallow the use of certain actions, such as Public Schools which permit the Compulsory Primary School Law; permit the Decree to Promote Social Mobility in a certain state; and even alter the effects of other parts of your society, like boost the efficacy of your Education System Institution. Without some degree of separation between Church and State, this form of secular school system is not possible.
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Another reason to change Laws is because your people demand it. As we touched on in the previous dev diary, Interest Groups have Ideologies that lead them to favor some Laws over others - for example, the Industrialists have the Individualist Ideology that cause them to favor privately operated Education and Healthcare systems over publicly funded ones, to ensure best access is given to those of merit and morals (or in other words, Wealth). Reforming your current Laws to work more in accordance with your powerful Interest Groups’ Ideologies is a quick way to win their Approval, permitting you more leeway to go against their wishes in the future or as a quick pick-me-up in case their Standard of Living has recently taken a hit.

The inverse is also true. Introduce a bill to abolish the Monarchy in Great Britain and see how the Landed Gentry feel about that.

Even Trade Unionists have a hard time saying no to zero income taxes, but even that won’t make up for restricting the vote!
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Enacting a Law is far from an instantaneous, one-click affair. First off, any reform must be supported by at least one Interest Group in your government who can champion the change. Once the reform has begun it can be a smooth process that’s over in a matter of months, or it can take years of gruelling debate in parliament or horsetrading between Interest Groups in order to pass. The amount of time it takes depends both on your government’s Legitimacy in the eyes of the people, and also on the Clout of the Interest Groups in your government that supports and opposes the new Law relative to the one it’s replacing. While broader coalitions of Interest Groups in government give you more options of Laws to enact, it also complicates getting them passed.

Changing your laws isn’t an entirely straightforward process in Victoria 3! In this case it’s just a matter of time before the Law is enacted, but if dissenting Interest Groups had also been part of this government there would be plenty of room for Debate and Stalling tactics that could cause this reform to take more effort than it’s worth.
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Let me close out here by tying all this back to the Pops. As we have touched on in past dev diaries, Pops have a Profession, collect an income, and consume goods depending on the economic preconditions you have created in your country. These material concerns in combination with a few others, such as Literacy, determine which Interest Groups they support. Other aspects, such as your country’s Laws, influence how much Political Strength the Pops provide to those Interest Groups. The Interest Groups have an Approval score and favor certain Laws over others. As a result, different groups of Pops approve more or less of the society you have built depending on their economic well-being, and their demands for change is more or less intimidating depending on how many and strong they are. You may choose to placate an angry group, or further benefit an already content group for extra benefits. But in doing so, some other group will become displeased. Have you built your society resilient enough to navigate these ebbs and flows? And most importantly, which of the many, many routes will you take to move forward?

That is all for me this week! In this dev diary I mentioned Institutions a number of times, and next Thursday I will be back with more details on this powerful society-shaping tool. Until then!
 
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Lorehead

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Vicky 2 represented slave and free states to some degree. On the one hand, you could just decide that Texas and Florida would abolish slavery when you admitted them, which was not exactly plausible. On the other, slaves in Boston and New York in 1860 would have been immersion-breaking. Regional laws, or at least some kind of modifiers, would be useful to represent Reconstruction and Jim Crow. This wasn’t how it worked in Brazil, though.
 
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grommile

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I can't wrap my head around all these, can we just have strong a strong military and security force and do anything we like using iron-hand rule?
In that scenario, you can't do "anything you like", only "what the army is prepared to tolerate you doing".
 
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Uncle_sia

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In that scenario, you can't do "anything you like", only "what the army is prepared to tolerate you doing".
Fair enough, tho im curious to know how what they want is determined, iirc armed forces would have their own interest group and im curious to know if they'll have a fixated ideology or if they're gonna be dynamic and vary from nation to nation, like a nation with a strong cult of personality should have an almost unquestioned loyalty from it's military force don't you think so?
 

dragonluke

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iirc armed forces would have their own interest group and im curious to know if they'll have a fixated ideology or if they're gonna be dynamic and vary from nation to nation,
they probably will
cause I imagine most coutries would have them be conservative, but if you have an anarchist or communist countries that wouldn't really work, would it?
 
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Uncle_sia

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they probably will
cause I imagine most coutries would have them be conservative, but if you have an anarchist or communist countries that wouldn't really work, would it?
I mean historically communist countries such as soviet union had a much celebrated and powerful military force plus an extremely influential security force, if militaries are gonna be conservative on default then how that can work?
 

Vernichtere

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I mean historically communist countries such as soviet union had a much celebrated and powerful military force plus an extremely influential security force, if militaries are gonna be conservative on default then how that can work?
First of all, attitudes of interest groups can change from time to time.

Then you just have to say that the military in the Soviet Union was quite conservative. It's always a question of how we relate to the rest of society. The military was more nationalistic, more undemocratic and patriarchal, even in the Soviet Union.

That is also the case in other areas. In America it is assumed that conservatism should automatically go hand in hand with free-market positions. But that is not correct in relation to Europe, for example.
 
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Uncle_sia

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yeah that's what I'm saying
Perhaps the armed forces interest group at start is going to be different in each nation depending on their military traditions but in span of the game and with reforms player can alter them accordingly, especially with rise of political parties which gonna happen sometime in the game so you can make militaries more ideological in favor of the ruling faction(though ofc certain characteristics are gonna remain the same)
 

Uncle_sia

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First of all, attitudes of interest groups can change from time to time.

Then you just have to say that the military in the Soviet Union was quite conservative. It's always a question of how we relate to the rest of society. The military was more nationalistic, more undemocratic and patriarchal, even in the Soviet Union.

That is also the case in other areas. In America it is assumed that conservatism should automatically go hand in hand with free-market positions. But that is not correct in relation to Europe, for example.
Agreed
 

Leoreth

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And I have problems with the fact that the population is allowed to vote at all.
I'm sorry, but I have no idea what this means in the context of my post.

To use the argument of gambling in order to force a central state to be installed is relatively weak.
Gambling? I never mentioned gambling.

I made an argument of what activities are fun to do in a game, which in my humble opinion is a relevant concern when discussing which features a game should include.

I find it weird that you are characterising me as trying to "force a central state to be installed", as if we are having a prescriptive policy debate about the real world. Maybe you are projecting your political positions into this discussion? I am purely talking about this from a game design perspective, opinions of centralism vs decentralism do not have to enter into it.

But for what it's worth, I have repeatedly reiterated that I would like to see some kind of system that reflects federal nations and how they are different from centralist nations. I just do not think that "every state can pass its own laws" is a good system to reflect federal political systems in terms of enjoyable gameplay.

The fact that the first two sentences of your reply to my post have no conceivable connection to what I said in the quoted text, and you go on to attribute positions to me that are not only unsupported by it but are in direct contradiction to what I said, leads me to think you need to try to express yourself better, and read other people's posts more carefully.
 

Sir.Dr.X

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Will we be able to set the length of the working day? Retirement rights? Unemployment benefits? It was possible in both Victoria and Victoria 2, but looking at the system presented in Victoria 3, it seems to be something missing. Can you add to what Victoria 2 offered in the third edition also the length of the working week? Let me remind you that the trade unions had to fight for a long time for the right to free Saturdays. As for the trade unions themselves, I do not see any rights regarding the possibility of creating trade unions. In Victoria 2 there was the right to non-socialist, all or no trade unions. It was not a perfect solution because there were no options - only the socialist trade unions. In this post I can see that Victoria 3 whould be very poor in this matter.
 

Shadowstrike

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I think the game is much more well served with the abstract system they are describing.

Everything you are talking about can be modeled with it. You mention different national political systems that give different amounts of power to specific groups. The system is already capable of modeling that, the laws you can pass include stuff like the franchise which in turn determines how much political power an IG has. It's both flexible and still applicable to a wide spectrum of political cultures and circumstances.

It sounds like you want to make stuff like a bicameral system etc. explicit in the game mechanics, which I don't see as desirable. That's way too much "every country is a special case" for me, where either nations are hard coded into a specific political system, or specific political systems are implemented with special rules to cover specific prominent nations, leaving every other nations with subpar base mechanics and a system that is full of special cases. Not to mention that you would have to learn how a specific system works.

I much prefer the generic but versatile approach they are taking from what we know so far. And honestly, I am really worried they will still go down the path you describe when it's time to sell DLCs and we get the "US government DLC" and "British government DLC" and "German government DLC". EU4 already went down this road where every country eventually had their separate systems, leading to a disconnected game with neglected base mechanics.

I feel like you're missing the point of what I'm arguing, in two specific ways.

1) The issue isn't simply that we had different interest groups with different amounts of power, it's that they had different levels of ability to make laws versus to block laws, and that arises as a consequence of the specifics of the political system that a particular country has set up. That would be poorly modeled in any system when you simply address "political power" as a single variable.

2) My argument isn't for hardcoded nation-specific systems, but rather for being able to dynamically set up (and change) such systems that can be applied to any country. There's nothing uniquely American about having a bicameral system with states in the upper house and population in the lower house, but how that worked had a huge impact on how America turned out. Constitutional reform was a huge huge thing in this period, and modeling the influence of how specific constitutional arrangements affected politics is hugely important. Otherwise, the political simulation gets way too abstract, and we get back to the issue of this replicating the EU4 estates system.
 
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SignedName

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We mainly simulate legal discrimination right now, though of course there's a whole grey zone beyond legal discrimination that we intend to at least represent through content, possibly some mechanics but we don't currently have anything nailed down for release there (informal discrimination is a thing that varies massively depending on time and place so it's not so straightforward to make good mechanics for).
A common theme of de facto discrimination was the use of mob violence against minorities, destroying businesses and killing people. The most (in)famous example being the Tsarist Russian pogroms, but also Nativist riots, Southern Redeemer violence (the likes of the KKK and White League), the Boxer Rebellion, etc. though the latter two could also be classified as insurgencies (with the Boxer Rebellion in particular escalating to full-scale war- perhaps the initial violence could be a war justification as massacres of Christians and missionaries were used as pretext for attacking both Vietnam and Korea as well- though in these cases the government was [more] directly involved in the persecution of Christians).
 

Leoreth

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I feel like you're missing the point of what I'm arguing, in two specific ways.

1) The issue isn't simply that we had different interest groups with different amounts of power, it's that they had different levels of ability to make laws versus to block laws, and that arises as a consequence of the specifics of the political system that a particular country has set up. That would be poorly modeled in any system when you simply address "political power" as a single variable.
Since laws can influence how much political power an interest group has, based on various sources (their wealth, voting rights, institutional privileges), I think this is represented fairly well. If someone has the ability to make laws, that is political power. If someone has the ability to block laws, that is political power. One time the power is used to support the law and the other it is used to prevent it. The current system already reflects that.

2) My argument isn't for hardcoded nation-specific systems, but rather for being able to dynamically set up (and change) such systems that can be applied to any country. There's nothing uniquely American about having a bicameral system with states in the upper house and population in the lower house, but how that worked had a huge impact on how America turned out. Constitutional reform was a huge huge thing in this period, and modeling the influence of how specific constitutional arrangements affected politics is hugely important. Otherwise, the political simulation gets way too abstract, and we get back to the issue of this replicating the EU4 estates system.
You can dynamically set up and change systems, by passing laws that affect the political power of interest groups. I agree that there is nothing American about a bicameral system and that it can be made available to any nation in the game, but development would still privilege specific political systems that are based on historical examples from prominent nations that will then get special rules, while less prominent nations will be left without their own distinct political systems available and forced to adopt ahistorical ones or bland generic base versions.

To draw a different EU4 analogy, this could easily end up like mission trees and idea groups, where first a select few nation's political systems get represented with special rules, but then people complain that other nations that are almost as important don't have their systems represented and we repeat ad nauseum. Along the way, later additions often are more powerful to incentivise buying DLC which throws the balance off, but even if we assume good intentions it is hard to get this many different special rules right in a way that is balanced.

The current system avoids all these problems. One size fits all may be a derogatory term but in terms of design I find it more appealing that everyone getting their own special cookie.

And as for estates... I find this comparison hard to talk about because they have been changed so much that I never know which incarnation people are referencing as a bad example. I never thought estates were bad because they were abstract. The problem mostly was that as a DLC feature, they didn't properly connect to other mechanics in the rest of the game where they should (exactly what I would like to avoid here). That didn't leave much purpose to them besides being system you can go to every once in a while to collect a bonus of mild impact, which is both unsatisfying and adds another unfun thing you have to do or you pay an opportunity cost. None of that is true for the political system in Vic3 from what we know.
 

Comrade_Winter

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Once the reform has begun it can be a smooth process that’s over in a matter of months, or it can take years of gruelling debate in parliament or horsetrading between Interest Groups in order to pass.
Wait a moment... SO we will have a parliament? Parties? Voting? Or only imaginary interest groups?

However i like how you done laws, and the capacity to form truly many way of governments. It's much better, then vic2, giving more freedom and customization.

I keep hoping for political parties and parliament.
 
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SignedName

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The laws category of "Economy" covers government funding and expenditure, which I don't think really fits for laws such as education or police systems. I think it would make more sense if the category were renamed to "Fiscal Policy" to better illustrate what these laws are about (how to allocate and then spend government funds). Especially as corporate regulations are in a separate category of laws (human rights), this will help avoid confusion.
 
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Shadowstrike

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Since laws can influence how much political power an interest group has, based on various sources (their wealth, voting rights, institutional privileges), I think this is represented fairly well. If someone has the ability to make laws, that is political power. If someone has the ability to block laws, that is political power. One time the power is used to support the law and the other it is used to prevent it. The current system already reflects that.

The issue here is that we're now assuming the power to make laws and the power to block laws are identical. That's really not the case. A similar argument might be that we can abstract the ability of a battleship to attack and defend into a single number, since both simply reflect "combat ability". That level of abstraction misses some critical details about what makes different political systems tick.

You can dynamically set up and change systems, by passing laws that affect the political power of interest groups. I agree that there is nothing American about a bicameral system and that it can be made available to any nation in the game, but development would still privilege specific political systems that are based on historical examples from prominent nations that will then get special rules, while less prominent nations will be left without their own distinct political systems available and forced to adopt ahistorical ones or bland generic base versions.

To draw a different EU4 analogy, this could easily end up like mission trees and idea groups, where first a select few nation's political systems get represented with special rules, but then people complain that other nations that are almost as important don't have their systems represented and we repeat ad nauseum. Along the way, later additions often are more powerful to incentivise buying DLC which throws the balance off, but even if we assume good intentions it is hard to get this many different special rules right in a way that is balanced.

The current system avoids all these problems. One size fits all may be a derogatory term but in terms of design I find it more appealing that everyone getting their own special cookie.

And as for estates... I find this comparison hard to talk about because they have been changed so much that I never know which incarnation people are referencing as a bad example. I never thought estates were bad because they were abstract. The problem mostly was that as a DLC feature, they didn't properly connect to other mechanics in the rest of the game where they should (exactly what I would like to avoid here). That didn't leave much purpose to them besides being system you can go to every once in a while to collect a bonus of mild impact, which is both unsatisfying and adds another unfun thing you have to do or you pay an opportunity cost. None of that is true for the political system in Vic3 from what we know.

I think you're strawmanning my argument a bit here. I'm not arguing that specific countries should have unique parlimentary mechanics that others don't have access to. I'm arguing that all countries should have the ability to access the same mechanics, but the player gets a chance to influence which sets of mechanics you set up (in countries that are doing constitutional reform), in a flexible way. I don't think that this would necessarily lead to "nation-locked" parliamentary setups in the way you fear. Aside from the US and the UK, nearly every other country had massive changes to the way their parliaments worked in the period (and you can argue that the US and UK systems changed in important ways too during the period). I feel like the system that's proposed is just too abstract and not representative of what was going on.
 
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grommile

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Aside from the US and the UK, nearly every other country had massive changes to the way their parliaments worked in the period
In 1836: the Lords could stop a bill dead; some constituencies returned multiple MPs; parliament had to be dissolved on a Demise of the Crown; and one in five adult men had the vote.

In 1936: the Lords could be overruled on any Government bill that passed the Commons in three consecutive years; every constituency returned a single MP; the parliamentary session was not interrupted by a Demise of the Crown; and almost every adult over the age of 21 had the vote.
 
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Leoreth

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The issue here is that we're now assuming the power to make laws and the power to block laws are identical. That's really not the case. A similar argument might be that we can abstract the ability of a battleship to attack and defend into a single number, since both simply reflect "combat ability". That level of abstraction misses some critical details about what makes different political systems tick.
I don't think so. The system simply abstracts the process of making and blocking laws into one process. You need both the power to advance a law and the power to prevent your law from being blocked to pass it. I don't think a differentiation of the two is essential to correctly represent the process.

I think you're strawmanning my argument a bit here. I'm not arguing that specific countries should have unique parlimentary mechanics that others don't have access to. I'm arguing that all countries should have the ability to access the same mechanics, but the player gets a chance to influence which sets of mechanics you set up (in countries that are doing constitutional reform), in a flexible way. I don't think that this would necessarily lead to "nation-locked" parliamentary setups in the way you fear. Aside from the US and the UK, nearly every other country had massive changes to the way their parliaments worked in the period (and you can argue that the US and UK systems changed in important ways too during the period). I feel like the system that's proposed is just too abstract and not representative of what was going on.
Sorry, I don't mean to strawman your position. I just think your position ignores what the implementation of your proposal would look like in practice. As I repeatedly stated (if we are already talking about not strawmanning each other), I am not worried about nation locking political systems. I am worried about only the political systems of certain nations being used for special rules, regardless of whether those are then made available to everyone. Because that still leaves everyone else, i.e. those nations whose historical political systems were not reflected with special rules, without "their" political system, in consequence still privileging a set of nations picked by the developers.

Most importantly, given the pressures of what historiography covers and also expectations of the player based and the resulting commercial incentives, I am particularly worried that such a specific system would turn out to be Eurocentric and would leave non-Western societies underrepresented.

I think the proposed system is perfectly representative of what is going on, in fact it is more powerful in that it can represent political processes in a greater number of political contexts than any specific system could. You seem to need the game mechanics to make certain political processes explicit for them to be "real" - I am content imagining whatever political processes are applicable to the nation in question as represented by the abstract system. I think you elide the fact that if certain processes are made explicit, you also set the expectation that things that are happening will be made explicit by the developers. In turn, there are actually less kinds of political systems and dynamics being represented by the system: those that the developers (for whatever reason) chose not to make explicit in the game.
 
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