I don't understand the problem with upperhouse ideologies to be honest. I have read your posts time and time again on this subject and you have never been able to articulate clearly what the problem is. This is before I have even discussed the additional ideological effects of the lower house parties in the game.
You should have said that before. That can make modding the Upper House ideologies more problematic than I thought.
Anyway, we know for a fact that Upper House ideologies and Lower House ideologies are seperate. Voters can 'mix-and-match' basically. They may prefer a Conservative Upper House because they like reforms as it is, but POPs vote on issues in the Lower House, and these issues can change. A POP may one day love Interventionism, but slowly change his beliefs to Planned Economy. You showed an example of a mix-and-match system, a Conservative Communist. There are other examples too: Communist Conservatives, Liberal Fascists, Conservative Conservative, Conservative Liberal, etc. There are a total of 49 possible combinations of Upper House ideologies and Lower House ideologies.
We can agree that Upper House Ideologies have very little relation to Lower House Ideologies, despite sharing the same name. They are not even remotely similar; a Conservative Communist is a far different beast from a Communist Conservative.
And if they are not the same thing, they should not be named the same thing! There's no reason for Upper House ideologies to have the same names as the Lower House ideologies. Far better then to give the Upper House ideologies new names.
I'm not aiming to convince you, I'm only aiming to explain my objection, in a way that others can understand too, if not agree.
Yeah, I also think that most of the confusion will be gone once people actually play this game. Additionally there have been people in this thread arguing and one of them (or both) were misinterpreting something. For example in Germany you could have lower house parties like these: Deutsche Fortschrittspartei, Deutsche Freisinnige Partei, Freisinnige Volkspartei, Nationalliberale Partei, Deutschkonservative Partei and Deutsche Reichspartei.
Now the first 4 parties are supporting things like free trade, laissez-faire government and all of that. They may differ in other ares like citizenship and military. You would call these parties liberal, but now most people would again confuse this with ideology. The parties will not be simply named "liberal party", "conservative party" and so on. And neither will it absolutely be necessary that there is just ONE party of any given political direction. As in this example these are 4 different parties that could be called liberal.
No, but they all have Party Labels, which are determined by either the game files, the programmers, or some other mechanic. These Party Labels serve as a minor game mechanic, in that they serve as a tie-breaker. If you have two Conservative voters who are stuck between, say, Deutsche Freisinnige Partei and Deutsche Fortschrittspartei, who like the issues from both parties, then the Conservative voter will then vote for the Party that has the Conservative Party Label (I don't know why, and frankly I don't care). They also have other uses, but the only confirmed other use for party labels is to signal a Fascist Upper House whether to allow the players to change reforms or not. Since I think Party Labels may still be important, I refer to Party Labels as Lower House Ideologies, different from Upper House ideologies.
So if someone says the "Liberal Party", he is talking about the Party with the Liberal Party Label. And if someone says a Conservative Liberal, he is talking about a person voting Conservative in the Upper House and the party with the Liberal Party label in the lower house. That's not mixing ideologies and parties together.
