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Dev Diary #45 - Elections

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Good evening and welcome once again to a Victoria 3 Development Diary! Today’s topic is elections. We’ll be covering the various laws that enable and affect voting, as well as the progression of Election Campaigns and how they affect political power in your country. We'll briefly be mentioning Political Parties in this dev diary, but they’re not the focus of this week - more on that next time! For now, I’ll just say that Political Parties in Victoria 3 exist in democracies and are made up of alliances of Interest Groups.

A country has Elections if it has any of the Distribution of Power laws that enable voting:
  • Landed Voting: Aristocrats, Capitalists, Clergymen, and Officers hold essentially all voting power, gaining a huge bonus to the Political Strength they contribute to their Interest Groups.
  • Wealth Voting: There is a Wealth Threshold that determines a pop’s eligibility to vote. Pops that can vote have more Political Strength.
  • Census Suffrage: The Wealth Threshold is significantly lower than in Wealth Voting. Literate pops contribute much more Political Strength to their Interest Groups.
  • Universal Suffrage: There is no Wealth Threshold for voting. Pop type and literacy do not grant additional Political Strength. Though of course a pop’s wealth will continue to contribute to their Political Strength, and Literacy will make pops more politically engaged.

Under the Wealth Voting Law, political power is held by the pops (and their Interest Groups) who can accumulate the most wealth, and largely denied entirely to the destitute. This naturally favors Aristocrats and the Landowners in more agricultural economies, while favoring Capitalists and the Industrialists in more industrialized economies.
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All of these laws are compatible with any of the Governance Principles laws. A country with the Monarchy law for instance could be an absolute monarchy with no voting system at all, or it could have Universal Suffrage - likewise a Republic might very well be a presidential dictatorship. If you are so inclined, you could even create a Council Republic or Theocracy that uses Wealth Voting (though it would be bound to create some political conflict, to put it lightly).

There are three factors that, when applicable, will prevent pops from voting entirely:
  1. Discrimination. Discriminated pops cannot vote in Elections.
  2. Living in an Unincorporated State. Only pops living in Incorporated States can participate in Elections. Pops living in, for example, a growing colony cannot vote.
  3. Politically Inactive pops do not vote, regardless of whether they are “legally” eligible. These pops are not part of any Interest Group, and tend to have low Literacy and/or Standard of Living. Peasants working in Subsistence Farms, for instance, are almost always Politically Inactive.

In 1913, suffragette Emily Davison was killed by the king’s horse during a race. A passionate believer in her cause, she had been arrested repeatedly by the British government and force-fed while on hunger strikes.
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This is a good opportunity to talk about the women’s suffrage movement. In Victoria 3, passing the Women’s Suffrage Law will greatly increase both your Workforce Ratio and your Dependent Enfranchisement. This means that a greater proportion of pops will be eligible to work in Buildings, and a much greater proportion of Dependents will now count towards the voting power of their pop. There will be very little support among Interest Groups to pass this Law in 1836 however. After researching Feminism (or having the technology spread to your country), politicians will begin to appear with the Feminist ideology, which causes them to strongly approve of Women’s Suffrage and disapprove of less egalitarian laws. Once you research Political Agitation, the suffrage movement will begin in full force. The ‘Votes for Women’ Journal Entry will appear, and events will trigger from it that will give you the opportunity to grow or suppress the Political Movement. You can complete the Journal Entry by passing the Law and having your first Election Campaign with women eligible to vote; alternatively you can ignore or suppress the movement until it loses its momentum and withers away.

Why, you ask, would you want to suppress the suffrage movement? If you’re striving for an egalitarian society you certainly wouldn’t. But if instead you’re trying to preserve the aristocracy and maintain a conservative nation then not only will your ruling Interest Groups strongly disapprove of Women’s Suffrage but it will also be very harmful to their political power. Greater Dependent Enfranchisement inherently benefits larger pops more than smaller pops (especially under more egalitarian Laws like Universal Suffrage where wealth counts for less), and it is inevitable that there are vastly more Laborers, Machinists, and Farmers than there ever will be Aristocrats or Capitalists. Pops may begin to wonder why the Lower Strata, the largest class, does not simply eat the other two.

The Whigs took a catastrophic hit in the polls after I repeatedly fired a negative election event to test the system.
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Elections happen every 4 years in countries with voting laws. An Election Campaign begins 6 months prior to a country’s Election date. Each Political Party is assigned a Momentum value at the beginning of the Campaign, which is a measure of the success of their campaign and is a major factor in determining how many Votes they will garner on election day. During this campaign, Momentum will fluctuate for each of the running Political Parties and impact the final result. Since Parties, Leaders, and many other aspects of the political scene in your country are likely to have changed in the years since the previous election, the Momentum from previous elections does not carry over and is reset. Momentum can be affected by chance, events, and the Popularity of Interest Group Leaders.

The Tories’ success in the last election empowered the Landed Gentry, though the sheer wealth of their aristocratic supporters is still the largest contributor to their Political Strength under Great Britain’s Wealth Voting law.
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When the Election Campaign ends, the votes are in and the results are set in place until the next election. Interest Groups receive additional Political Strength from their party’s Votes, which will be a major factor determining your Legitimacy and therefore the effectiveness of your government. The actual makeup of your government is still up to you; just like the electoral systems of most modern countries, winning the popular vote does not automatically mean that a certain party or coalition of parties gets to form a government. But the post-election strength of your Interest Groups and their Party affiliations should be a major consideration, especially if you’re forming a minority government.

In Victoria 3, Elections can be a powerful force for political change but also a source of volatility. Dealing with (and if you’re so inclined, manipulating) Election results will be a major consideration when you form your governments. In this dev diary I’ve mentioned Political Parties, and we know you’re eager to hear more about them since the last time we communicated on the topic. You’ll be pleased to discover that in next week’s dev diary we’ll be covering our design for Political Parties in more detail, so watch this space!
 
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Is this hardcoded?
Virtually nothing is hardcoded, the term limit is just a define / parameter in the game files you can change if you want it longer or shorter. Making it variable based on decisions taken in-game isn't currently supported but should be very easy to do, for mod support at the very least. I'll put it on the todo-list. :)
 
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Why is it disappointing? I find the interest group system attractive because it allows for autocracies, oligarchies, etc. to be represented better than they were before. There are no more bizarre parties like the Tsarist party or Metternich's Faction. Having elections this way complements that system, makes it deeper. Allowing the player to continue to select interest groups at a hit to legitimacy can be thought of as rigging an election.

It is also more accurate for democracies as well. The wealthy industrialists won't lose all their influence even if they lost the election and the entire parliament is against them, they would still have massive influence through control of their companies and newspapers. The intelligentsia won't lose its influence even if their preferred party is lost in a landslide, as they can still control the political discourse and push new ideas forward. The examples are endless. Reducing all of politics to parties and elections like you are taught in civics classes is doing the game a great disservice, they are but one cog in a complex societal machine and can sometimes be a fairly minor one at that.
 
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we need to give the player a chance to build a ruling coalition. Say an election split the vote 50/30/20 between the Conservative, Free Trade, and Religious parties. I might not want the Conservatives in charge at all, and decide the Free Trade + Religious parties result in sufficient Legitimacy to get by - or I could sideline the Free Trade party entirely by putting the Conservative and Religious parties in charge. This is hardly even "gamey", these kinds of post-election negotiations that set the terms for what might be politically feasible during the upcoming mandate period is virtually the norm in almost all democratic countries. We also permit free Interest Groups unaligned with any party to support a ruling party, if for example the Armed Forces have decided to stand outside party politics entirely but still have considerable Wealth-derived Political Strength due to consisting mostly of Aristocrats and well-paid Officers and supported by high-ranking Generals. So player input into which coalition should form (and support) the government is necessary.

What puts some of us off is that this continues the trend of near-total player control over internal affairs, to the point that POPs are left without agency. It feels as if I won't be interacting with the simulation so much as forcing myself on it, and that's not the kind of game I'm looking forward to play.

BTW, Vicky 2 handled multiparty coalitions without player input (though the process left a lot of room for improvement).
 
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The reason an election doesn't simply cause "the winning" party to take power is because, outside of two-party states, we need to give the player a chance to build a ruling coalition. Say an election split the vote 50/30/20 between the Conservative, Free Trade, and Religious parties. I might not want the Conservatives in charge at all, and decide the Free Trade + Religious parties result in sufficient Legitimacy to get by - or I could sideline the Free Trade party entirely by putting the Conservative and Religious parties in charge. This is hardly even "gamey", these kinds of post-election negotiations that set the terms for what might be politically feasible during the upcoming mandate period is virtually the norm in almost all democratic countries. We also permit free Interest Groups unaligned with any party to support a ruling party, if for example the Armed Forces have decided to stand outside party politics entirely but still have considerable Wealth-derived Political Strength due to consisting mostly of Aristocrats and well-paid Officers and supported by high-ranking Generals. So player input into which coalition should form (and support) the government is necessary.

Normally, when kicking an Interest Group (or a Party, along with all its Interest Groups) out of government, it gains a bunch of Radicals who are displeased with being removed from power. Just after an election, this penalty is revoked for a single reformation of the player's government, incentivizing using this opportunity to optimize Legitimacy in light of these new election results.

On the subject of the fine details of electoral systems (length of mandate periods, proportional vs first-past-the-post, upper and lower houses, etc.) these details are very interesting and we've played with laws that govern some of this in the past. The problem was that they were hard to balance so they mattered as much as the other laws, and they did not feel impactful to enact. Not implying here that the details of electoral systems are unimportant - I've certainly had my share of lengthy debates of the impact of MMP vs FPTP - but in the simulation the impact isn't felt as tangibly and doesn't affect gameplay as much as, say, extending the voting franchise to more Pops or instituting a welfare program. So to do this justice we'd probably need a system of sub-laws or configurable laws, which isn't something we'll be able to do for release at least.
This makes a lot more sense, but would the player be able to do the same if the conservative party got 52% of the vote? Does the player have to build a government from parties that sums up to 50% or more of the electorate, or can the player build a ruling "coalition" of only the Free Trade party? And what does it mean when an interest group is unaligned; do their members just not vote? It also seems like party formation should be where a lot of this coalition building is hashed out; interest groups should try to form parties to combine their clout to enable electoral majorities before elections, at the cost of having to support things that they don't care about as much. I feel like overall we just don't have enough info here on the guts of how governments are actually put together and function, especially with respect to how (or if) it interacts with leaders and such.

As I said earlier, this system seems to work pretty well to represent parliamentary systems without a strong executive, but I can see it doing very poorly at representing presidential systems that were common in the Americas in this time period. I appreciate that the fine structural distinctions between democratic forms don't matter as much as things like the franchise, but I think that in the end you're really doing a disservice to the large amount of variation that exists in democracies by putting them all into one box.
 
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just like the electoral systems of most modern countries, winning the popular vote does not automatically mean that a certain party or coalition of parties gets to form a government.
That's a blatant anglophone propaganda lie.

UPD: got a lot of downvotes for this, and I don't really get why. Is this a linguistic issue, where "winning the popular vote" refers to winning the plurality, and not the majority, as I had thought?
Because if not, the party that wins the majority is guaranteed to get the majority of seats under most voting systems. The Commonwealth and the US are notable exceptions for sure, but are not the norm.
 
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In terms of suffrage and work, this seems… almost entirely backwards? Women (and indeed, children) were mass employed (in agriculture, in textiles, and more) long before they gained the right to vote. In fact, logically, women working should drive increased suffrage demands, not voting increasing how many people work. That said, in most of the industrializing nations of this time period, pretty much everyone worked. They were sending nine year olds to mine coal and sweep chimneys. So if anything, workforce participation should decline with progress, not increase.
 
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Why on God's green Earth do Farmers not count for Landed Voting?
Because they aren't the type of landed its supposed to represent. Landed Voting is pretty much for things like the Landed Gentry and other people of significant socio-economic means. Farmers typically neither have the wealth or status for what is essentially pre-1832 British voting.
 
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I will join the rest here and say that a certain amount of the Farmer pops should hold political power as well in landed voting. Countries like Sweden and Finland even had them as a fourth estate in their medieval parliaments.

It would also be an interesting way of preventing revolution to try and bring more of the peasantry into the landed category and allow them representation.
 
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Why, you ask, would you want to suppress the suffrage movement? If you’re striving for an egalitarian society you certainly wouldn’t. But if instead you’re trying to preserve the aristocracy and maintain a conservative nation then not only will your ruling Interest Groups strongly disapprove of Women’s Suffrage but it will also be very harmful to their political power. Greater Dependent Enfranchisement inherently benefits larger pops more than smaller pops (especially under more egalitarian Laws like Universal Suffrage where wealth counts for less), and it is inevitable that there are vastly more Laborers, Machinists, and Farmers than there ever will be Aristocrats or Capitalists. Pops may begin to wonder why the Lower Strata, the largest class, does not simply eat the other two.

So, it's difficult if not impossible to create conditions where women have full rights, but unless their aristocrats or nouveau riche that really doesn't matter for anything? I was kinda hope I could actually expand the influence of the aristocracy and their peers by letting their wives and daughter vote while the unwashed peasants get left out, but at least their lady-folk can join the factory floor!
 
Because they aren't the type of landed its supposed to represent. Landed Voting is pretty much for things like the Landed Gentry and other people of significant socio-economic means. Farmers typically neither have the wealth or status for what is essentially pre-1832 British voting.
The entire world isn't pre-1832 Britain. In fact, none of the world is pre-1832 Britain.
 
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It is also more accurate for democracies as well. The wealthy industrialists won't lose all their influence even if they lost the election and the entire parliament is against them, they would still have massive influence through control of their companies and newspapers. The intelligentsia won't lose its influence even if their preferred party is lost in a landslide, as they can still control the political discourse and push new ideas forward. The examples are endless. Reducing all of politics to parties and elections like you are taught in civics classes is doing the game a great disservice, they are but one cog in a complex societal machine and can sometimes be a fairly minor one at that.

I don't think IGs lose all of their influence just because the party they backed lost an election. If you read the DD it says that the election results boost the clout of IGs that are affiliated with parties that earned votes. Based on the Distribution of Power laws IGs have different levels of Political Strength based on wealth as well as modifiers, the more democratic the country is the less that wealth matters compared to raw numbers in the population. So far the way it appears parties are being implemented does not strip IGs of their importance, some of them are unaffiliated free agents and those in parties gain extra Political Strength based on election results since they have popular support from the electorate. It's possible they could even matter more if party coalitions are able to change over time, something we currently know nothing about. You also still have to deal with them when they are in government in balancing their differing demands even if some of them come packaged in parties.

Now I understand you were someone who was vocally opposed to parties being added in the first place so this is a point where we will have to agree to disagree on whether their inclusion is necessary. It just seems hard to talk about politics during the time span of Vicky 3 without bringing up the emergence of organized political parties representing a variety of interests that contested elections in democratic countries. Trying to represent things purely through IGs for democracies is a level of abstraction that was too much for a lot of folks myself included hence the feedback after the announcement asking for their inclusion on top of the existing IG system. And it's clear the devs agreed that putting them in was warranted hence why we are seeing them being put into the game after not originally being planned.
 
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When the Election Campaign ends, the votes are in and the results are set in place until the next election. Interest Groups receive additional Political Strength from their party’s Votes, which will be a major factor determining your Legitimacy and therefore the effectiveness of your government. The actual makeup of your government is still up to you; just like the electoral systems of most modern countries, winning the popular vote does not automatically mean that a certain party or coalition of parties gets to form a government. But the post-election strength of your Interest Groups and their Party affiliations should be a major consideration, especially if you’re forming a minority government.

Dissapointed about it, the idea that post-election you can completly ignore a coalition with 80% of votes and make a minority government formed exclusively by non-marginalized IGs even if they have just 5% of votes and your only cost will be a legitimacy hit definitely don't sound like a authentic experience, if a player want to have total control about what IGs form his government he should not choose to be a democracy in the first place.

The reason an election doesn't simply cause "the winning" party to take power is because, outside of two-party states, we need to give the player a chance to build a ruling coalition. Say an election split the vote 50/30/20 between the Conservative, Free Trade, and Religious parties. I might not want the Conservatives in charge at all, and decide the Free Trade + Religious parties result in sufficient Legitimacy to get by - or I could sideline the Free Trade party entirely by putting the Conservative and Religious parties in charge. This is hardly even "gamey", these kinds of post-election negotiations that set the terms for what might be politically feasible during the upcoming mandate period is virtually the norm in almost all democratic countries. We also permit free Interest Groups unaligned with any party to support a ruling party, if for example the Armed Forces have decided to stand outside party politics entirely but still have considerable Wealth-derived Political Strength due to consisting mostly of Aristocrats and well-paid Officers and supported by high-ranking Generals. So player input into which coalition should form (and support) the government is necessary.

These are good arguments in favor of making the player have some input post-elections when deciding about which IGs will form his new government and I agree that players should have some input forming a coalition post-election in democratic governments, but these arguments don't justify situations where players can ignore Tories with 99% of votes and form a government only with IGs members of Whig party and the only cost doing something like it would be a big legitimacy hit, this situation is not authentic/immersive at all. Player input post-election should not be limitless.
 
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these arguments don't justify situations where players can ignore Tories with 99% of votes
Basically the devs once again decided to sacrifice what we see as a more accurate simulation for what they see as a better game.
Same can be observed in the infamous building construction question: the devs feel it's important for the game that player builds everything manually and that no construction can contradict with his wishes.

I don't quite agree with the stance, but I hope to be wrong. I hope that this will be a great game.
 
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Well I'd be worried if it was... sounds positively dreadful.
Yeah, it's bad enough that 2022 Britain exists right now.

Seriously though, Farmers need to count for Landed Votes for a number of countries. Or hell, let us customize it to some extent. The lack of modularity when it comes to certain things in this game is baffling, given its apparent design of "Literally everything is controlled by the player and not by the POPs" in so many aspects, like building construction and production methods.
 
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Basically the devs once again decided to sacrifice what we see as a more accurate simulation for what they see as a better game.
Same can be observed in the infamous building construction question: the devs feel it's important for the game that player builds everything manually and that no construction can contradict with his wishes.

I don't quite agree with the stance, but I hope to be wrong. I hope that this will be a great game.

Ultimately, our wallets have the final vote.
 
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No religion/culture factor in voting or parties?
Vicky had this, but because there were no coalitions didn't use it.
Please bring it back, even if only for modders. It's vital for the period and would make voting blocs way more interesting.
Thank you
 
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Please make it so IGs can be split by parties, as this shows how 2 party systems and the like come to be.
Two-party systems come to be when your country uses single-member constituencies with simple plurality voting.