Political System Overhaul

[Panagean]

Before beginning, I admit this is more of a wishlist for what-could-have-been, or a suggestion for a detailed mod, than something that is likely to be implemented, but I wanted to get my thoughts down somewhere. I tend to sketch this sort of thing out when I can't fall asleep, so getting it down somewhere will help my insomnia at the least.

Problems with the existing political system
I don't like the existing political system. My issues broadly are:

• International rigidity: different countries all have the same interest groups, and those interest groups broadly believe the same things
• Temporal rigidity: interest groups almost never change their minds, even once an issue is long-since "settled"
• Internal rigidity: interest groups and more broadly the political alignments they represent, are unitary and don't represent the fractiousness of this period in particular: there is only one type of landowner (e.g. no Southern slaveowners versus Yankees, Hungarian aristocrats versus Austrian ones) nor any division between types of liberalism (classical versus new), let alone socialism (Marxism, Leninism, Stalininism, Bakunite anarchism, other anarchisms, Proudhonism, Fourierism, neo-Jacobinism....).
• Hyper-determinism: this is partly a product of player-control over the economy, but broadly speaking political change happens because people change jobs in a predictable fashion, leading to consistent liberalisation in the 19th century followed by some form of social democracy in the 20th unless a player repeatedly chooses to play sub-optimally
• Law passage system is dull: pick a law, wait for it to tick up, roll a die, win or try again.
• Strange revolts with weak demands and poor naming - I'm going to leave revolts largely out-of-scope of this, but this seems fairly easy to fix to me by a) tinkering with revolt naming and b) have revolts enforce all political demands of the group making the revolt.

My changes broadly revolve around trying to fix these problems as I see them. The broad scope is to take a system that currently has:

• Interest groups...
• ...which sometimes cohere into parties...
• ...which are in government or opposition, and the government has a leading party.

And replace it with a system that has:

• Political movements...
• ...which usally cohere into parties or factions...
• ...which each have a leading movement, and those parties or factions...
• ...are either in government or opposition.

While not changing too much about how those systems individually function.

Political movements
Instead of interest groups, the game would have a lot of (far more granular) political movements, with the goal to keep 6-10 active in any given nation at any given time: this would probably neccesitate some dynamic system that a) retires political movements which have become marginalised for some time (I envision political movement who have all their demands met becoming gradually less popular over time) and b) increases the probability of an event triggering the formation of a political movement if there aren't enough already in play. New political movements would emerge as the result of events based off triggered modifiers, and there is naturally some discussion about how historical these should be: can the Peelites (British conservative free traders who formed the basis of the Liberal Party) emerge in any country where free trade is not in effect and food costs are high, or only in Britain in 1846, for example? I think the answer is probably closer to the first (not least because that's the overall game philosophy), but probably not all the way.

Political movements' behaviour would be determined by their traits, which would fall in three categories:

• Political: what laws do they want? This would, at least initially, be more limited than the sweeping statements currently in effect. Peelites might want free trade and a dedicated police force, Southern Planters might want slavery (and other things - afraid I'm not an American historical politics expert), both suffragettes and suffragists would want female suffrage. Political movements can acquire more traits as part of the law passage process, below.
• Attractional: what pops are more likely to join their base? C19th One Nation Tories might be more attractive to farmers, labourers, peasants, clergymen and aristocrats, and less attractive to capitalists; Southern Planters might be more attractive to Dixie-cultured pops, and so on. There's a balance here to be struck here on freeform versus historicity, and I imagine that political movements would acquire these traits over time as the result of events and gameplay, rather than be strictly historically bound. Movements also become more or less popular if they are in government while living standards increase/decrease, or if prestige rises or falls, wars are won or lost, etc. during their tenure. Leading movements in government would also become less popular if they do not pass any of their political demands (see below).
• Associational: who are they willing to work with? This section will be come clearer after the section on government formation. Chartists might start with a "liberal" tag, implying they are more willing to work with other groups that have a "liberal" tag as well (more on this later) - note that this does not actually imply they endorse any liberal policies, as these come from the political traits. These would fall in four categories: natural association (liberals will always be willing to work with other liberals), partial association (conservatives may work with liberals and fascists on occaison), refusal (conservatives will never work with communists) or total refusal (certain entirely oppositional/non-parliamentary groups like Bolsheviks and Suffragettes will never join the government unless they are the only/most powerful voice in it). Note that some movements will not start with associational tags at all (e.g. the Peelites would probably start without one, and gain a liberal tag later), indicating that they can be "picked up" by other parties depending on the political winds. Note that you can use these to simulate internecine rivlary between different similarly-minded factions (e.g. participants in the First International).

Party and government formation
I am going to use the word "party" to refer to both parties and factions: parties occur in democracies, factions in autocracies, but I will treat them the same way. Parties cohere as the result of the associational tags. If a movement has multiple natural associational tags, they will join the largest party or the one where they'll have the most clout in some simple AI balance of being a big fish in a small pond versus being a small fish in a big pond. Movements without associational tags, or only with negative tags, stay independent. So in 1836, as a sketch, the UK may have a Whig Party made of Whigs (associational traits: whig, liberal) and Chartists (associational traits: whig, liberal), and a Conservative party made of Tories (traits: conservative), Anglicans (traits: conservative) and High Tories (traits: conservative, reactionary). I envision the "top" 20 or so countries having custom setups like this, with some default fallback for other countries (or, realistically, sold as DLC down the line).

Each party also gains a "leading movement" from whichever movement has the most clout - in this case, the Whigs and the Tories. This will be important for the law passage process.

The player then has to assemble a government from these parties(/factions), ideally ensuring they acheive more than the "legitimacy threshold" in the process. In autocracies, this is set low, say 10% (only one faction really needs to be in charge), and in true democracies, it is set around 50%. Mixed systems fall between the two. Autocracies receive higher radical generation by default, but in democracies there are greater scaling penalties to radical generation if a government does not meet the legitimacy threshold - and maybe some loyalist bonuses if it exceeds it. This is where the associational traits come into play:

• Natural associations will form parties, which always enter governments as a bloc
• Partial associations will only join the government if the legitimacy threshold is not met: you can get alliances of liberals and conservatives, but only if the result would otherwise be a minority government
• Refusals mean that, for example, you cannot form a government formed of conservatives and communists, whatever the consequences for government legitimacy
• Total refusals basically make the game harder, and make it possible to tip you into a revolution. If 30% of your clout goes to the Bolsheviks, you better hope that the remaining 70% will cooperate enough to keep the government running
• Unassociated groups can be used to "top" up party blocs - so the Peelites, for example, may be able to join the Conservative or Whig government as the player sees fit.

Law passage
Laws are available to pass if they are supported by a movement in government. In all cases, your goal is to get the law-supporting groups to have over that legitimacy threshold (i.e. it's easier to ram things through in a dictatorship, but also gives limited chances to forge a consensus). The agenda of the leading movement within each political party will always be accepted by other movements within that political party (they "buy-in" to the programme), and you can still pass laws supported by non-leading movements, but it will be harder.

I've been really struck by how the existing system describes law passage as a process of "debate" but doesn't feel like it. In this overhauled system, debates would be principally how existing political movements acquire new political traits.

While a law is up for debate, it will have a 100% chance of passing if it has a legitimacy-threshold crossing majority, and a 0% chance if not. Each debate cycle (currently represented by the progress bar - to be honest, I'd just have random event timers, as I hate the progress-bar centric UI, but that's just me), an event will occur, typically changing some political movement's traits and maybe effecting their popularity among different parts of the population. There would generally be a choice on how to proceed. Some examples:

• An opposition movement may agree to support the law in exchange for some cost - maybe the government has to offer a bribe (government funds down), or the ruling party has to award them a key political seat (lowers clout or ruling party attraction). This would give them a political trait supporting the law for only so long as the current debate is in progress.
• A movement that does not support the law may genuinely and permanently change their mind to support it, potentially changing popularities or clout
• Two movements campaigning on the same side may realise their similarities and adopt other non-shared traits, such as political support for another policy, or even each other's associational traits, meaning they will serve together in government in the future
• Any movement may make an impassioned speech to one section of the population, or alienating another, acquring an attractional trait.

And that's it. Thank you for reading my ramble.

 

[FryFroFella]

This sounds great to me, not sure why you are worried about its viability in the other thread

 

[Panagean]

Thank you! I still think this would be my preferred system if it worked really well, but my concerns basically are:

• As a ground-up simulation, this could wind up with some really wacky/ahistorical consequences without some really careful scripting. V3 already struggles with plausible historical outcomes a lot of the time, so this quite chaotic system might through another spanner in the mix after the first pre-set historical generation.
• Legibility: apparently players struggled with more than 8 IG groups when IG groups were initially being developed. This system would mean that you couldn't take as much assumed knowledge from game to game about what each political faction wanted, which might be hard for players.
• Content-volume: to do this right would require scripted triggers, ideally with a little bit of flavour text, for every position on every law in order to span new political movements, as well as a slough of new events for the debate system. V3 currently doesn't have enough events anyway, so this would be a huge additional undertaking. Additionally, I wonder whether I have underestimated the amount of research and writing required to initialise the top 20 or so nations to sensible political movement mixes.

 

[Lazy Sorcerer]

• Total refusals basically make the game harder, and make it possible to tip you into a revolution. If 30% of your clout goes to the Bolsheviks, you better hope that the remaining 70% will cooperate enough to keep the government running

This is a no-go for Paradox, since players already whine now when they get themselves in a situation where they can't form a legitimate government. I can only forsee the game becoming even easier in this aspect as Paradox tries to aleviate this.