One of the things that was strange to me about Victoria was that you had events, even random events like those that happened during elections, which would randomly convert a percentage of people to some political ideology. Unless your nation was already set up economically and politically to push people in that direction already, chances were they'd switch back fairly quickly. Making 10% of your nation socialists from being conservatives, with the click of a button, wasn't always the best idea and it wasn't always very useful as they'd often switch back, but more than anything it also was not the best model of politics at the time.
In Victoria there are four base political ideologies with an extreme version for each except fascism, which has no extreme.
Conservative -> Reactionary
Liberal -> Anarcho-Liberal
Socialist -> Communist
Fascist
The extremes were based for the most part on militancy, i.e. a socialist who became very militant would become a communist, a liberal who became very militant would become an anarcho-liberal. What I'd suggest as more interesting for the game as a whole, with more options for modders and increased realism, would be to model each pop with a simple set of coordinates on a political axis.
By giving every pop two coordinate axis, economic and social, we allow a much wider modeling of POP behavior and a much more progressive slide from one ideology to another taking place over generations or quickly as revolutionary events occur.
Here's an example of a very basic political compass. Utilizing it you can model behaviors in a way that can respond to militancy without being directly tied to it. You could hence have a 'radical' society without necessarily having high militancy, while at the same time you could still allow high militancy to more quickly drive people to extremes of the various axis. Modeling everything from monarchists, anarcho-capitalists, complete anarchists, social democrats, authoritarian communists, anarcho-communists, fascists, and everything in-between would be easily done.
Instead of every POP having a single ideology attribute, they'd have two. So rather than this...
ideology=fascist
You'd have this...
social=9
economic=10
Thus the rise of communism might result in a large number of spreading events that move people's economic policy leftwards without affecting their social policy, thus a country like Russia that was an authoritarian monarchy might find itself with a large number of authoritarian communists. On the other hand a country with a lot of social freedoms might find itself more along the lines of an Anarcho-Communist nation, with extremely left-wing economics and extreme political freedom. As Paradox games are well known for having sliders, and Hearts of Iron already has such a system for parsing a variety of slider positions to give a name to a specific ideology, I don't think this would be particularly difficult or processing resource-intensive. It would open up a lot more options for political events and POP related events, as well as for an organic spread of political ideas from their centers of development.
You could also define the ideology of parties according to the spectrum rather than simply putting the name of the ideology onto it. In Victoria now it's not necessarily possible to model a party as particularly different from another when their ideology is the same. But with a coordinate system, you could have two parties whose ideology was still 'conservative' and who still supported the same basic systems, however one might well be more authoritarian than the other and hence might be more or less successful in elections depending on the population who would vote for them, as opposed to now where two parties with similar ideologies might get votes seemingly at random.
I just think this would be an interesting thing to put into the game, especially as many people are already familiar with a political compass type model. You could even tie this in to the sandbox type game where while countries would start with a few political parties, they would dynamically generate new parties based on the desires of the population. Thus if a large segment of the population of a nation becomes authoritarian and economically right-wing in 1887 due to having been humiliated, having their national provinces taken in a war, suffering a severe economic depression, then a fascist party would be created on its own rather than having to wait for 1905 for everyone in the world to magically gain a fascist party, much more like the system of new religions appearing in EU3 where the first nation to take a certain path gets the chance to found Protestantism or Reformed religion, someone might found 'Fascism' as a viable political ideology and have it spread from there.
In Victoria there are four base political ideologies with an extreme version for each except fascism, which has no extreme.
Conservative -> Reactionary
Liberal -> Anarcho-Liberal
Socialist -> Communist
Fascist
The extremes were based for the most part on militancy, i.e. a socialist who became very militant would become a communist, a liberal who became very militant would become an anarcho-liberal. What I'd suggest as more interesting for the game as a whole, with more options for modders and increased realism, would be to model each pop with a simple set of coordinates on a political axis.
By giving every pop two coordinate axis, economic and social, we allow a much wider modeling of POP behavior and a much more progressive slide from one ideology to another taking place over generations or quickly as revolutionary events occur.
Here's an example of a very basic political compass. Utilizing it you can model behaviors in a way that can respond to militancy without being directly tied to it. You could hence have a 'radical' society without necessarily having high militancy, while at the same time you could still allow high militancy to more quickly drive people to extremes of the various axis. Modeling everything from monarchists, anarcho-capitalists, complete anarchists, social democrats, authoritarian communists, anarcho-communists, fascists, and everything in-between would be easily done.
Instead of every POP having a single ideology attribute, they'd have two. So rather than this...
ideology=fascist
You'd have this...
social=9
economic=10
Thus the rise of communism might result in a large number of spreading events that move people's economic policy leftwards without affecting their social policy, thus a country like Russia that was an authoritarian monarchy might find itself with a large number of authoritarian communists. On the other hand a country with a lot of social freedoms might find itself more along the lines of an Anarcho-Communist nation, with extremely left-wing economics and extreme political freedom. As Paradox games are well known for having sliders, and Hearts of Iron already has such a system for parsing a variety of slider positions to give a name to a specific ideology, I don't think this would be particularly difficult or processing resource-intensive. It would open up a lot more options for political events and POP related events, as well as for an organic spread of political ideas from their centers of development.
You could also define the ideology of parties according to the spectrum rather than simply putting the name of the ideology onto it. In Victoria now it's not necessarily possible to model a party as particularly different from another when their ideology is the same. But with a coordinate system, you could have two parties whose ideology was still 'conservative' and who still supported the same basic systems, however one might well be more authoritarian than the other and hence might be more or less successful in elections depending on the population who would vote for them, as opposed to now where two parties with similar ideologies might get votes seemingly at random.
I just think this would be an interesting thing to put into the game, especially as many people are already familiar with a political compass type model. You could even tie this in to the sandbox type game where while countries would start with a few political parties, they would dynamically generate new parties based on the desires of the population. Thus if a large segment of the population of a nation becomes authoritarian and economically right-wing in 1887 due to having been humiliated, having their national provinces taken in a war, suffering a severe economic depression, then a fascist party would be created on its own rather than having to wait for 1905 for everyone in the world to magically gain a fascist party, much more like the system of new religions appearing in EU3 where the first nation to take a certain path gets the chance to found Protestantism or Reformed religion, someone might found 'Fascism' as a viable political ideology and have it spread from there.