No, it seems either broken or very poorly conveyed. If you look at the happiness tooltip the intuitive way of calculating doesn't add up.
There have been some theories that the political power ratio has a cap. For example that rulers political power never exceeds 400% of that of a worker even though they should have like 10 times as much. (only in the actual calculation though, the tooltip is still the same) Why that is I have no clue. It makes all those political power modifiers like in stratified completely useless.
There was a thread here just today tackling that subject. Maybe you can dig it up.