Victoria 3 - Dev Diary #6 - Interest Groups

[Baneslave]

If someone can explain why you can better represent a political party as a costellation of abstract IG is better then having a party that follow up ideologies and have his own percentage of approval from the population i would be happy to discuss.

1. IGs are less formal, thus fit more systems better. Parties don't represent court factions, dictatorship cliques and other such things well.

2. Parties gaining approval based purely on votes is naive, as rich and powerful still do have more influence in system compared to number of votes they actually have. And people can still effect politics even if they don't have formal voting power.

3. Ideological view paints with too broad strokes. Liberal factory owner and liberal factory worker should have different view on some issues, and should be able to wrangle over those, even if they support same political party.

So IGs by themselves represent politics better than PPs by themselves. If political parties are to be added as another layer they should add meaningful complexity.

 

[dragonluke]

But I assume it will NOT be possible to become a monarchy as the USA or get an interest group that supports a monarchy in the USA in UNMODDED vanilla, right?

Secondly, if not as the USA, maybe as the CSA?

obviously it's gonna be possible, what are you talking about?
I remember the devs saying ig can have radical changes depending on leaders, so if a communist takes over a ig it could lead to it becoming more communist in ideology

 

[Bearjuden]

> Interest Groups will generally favor laws that benefit them in some way

I realize this should usually be true but I hope the "generally" isn't just for show; sometimes people just glom onto causes that have nothing to do with them or even oppose what is (from the outside at least) their self-interest.

> What I can tell you for now is that we are currently looking into a solution where parties can form in certain countries as constellations of Interest Groups holding a shared political platform.

I don't know that I ever thought political parties were that important to have compared to interest groups but if you think you can make it work, then great. Far more important to me is the possibility of having different subfactions of interest groups, since it's not usually that all industrialists (for example) have the same outlook. I don't recall if you described this as the case already but I hope it's that one interest group can have a variety of different internal positions and the one that is "dominant" is the one that is represented as shorthand at most. It feels like in most descriptions that I remember, any given interest group has one selected favored opinion. Or alternately that the seeming bind between pop jobs and pop interest group is much weaker than it seems to be intended so far? So that wealthy capitalists for example have many different interest groups they can bind to rather than always being sucked into the industrialist interest group and then all having the same viewpoints.

(idk why highlighting some of the text doesn't seem to bring up the possibility of replying to a selection of a post anymore but both of these quotes are from the original dev post, if there is somehow any doubt)

 

[blobmaneatsme]

a point of interest would be given that interest groups differ between nations, if two nations merge do the similar interest groups merge with them or could you have for example
the Prussian land owners and the French landowners in Alsace Lorraine, would they support different versions of the same landowner interest group?
would the interest groups merge with each other?
what determines witch one would become dominant or would it take traits from both?

 

[lachek]

I'm not sure about this "high literacy = demand liberal reforms" and "low literacy = don't demand liberal reforms".

There were countries with a very literate population that supported non-liberal regimes (Prussia/Germany, for example).

Literate population should demand reforms, but not necessarily liberal reforms: they should demand right-wing reforms too.

Also, I think public schools could be used by the government to promote the government's ideology (no matter if its left or right wing).

Yeah, that's not what I meant. High Literacy = more political participation. High Literacy + poor Laborer frustrated they have no voice in government and police beat them when they try to organize = more political participation by people who want more liberal reforms.

Public Schools causing increased attraction for government Interest Group is a neat idea, thanks!

 

[Comrade_Winter]

1. IGs are less formal, thus fit more systems better. Parties don't represent court factions, dictatorship cliques and other such things well.

2. Parties gaining approval based purely on votes is naive, as rich and powerful still do have more influence in system compared to number of votes they actually have. And people can still effect politics even if they don't have formal voting power.

3. Ideological view paints with too broad strokes. Liberal factory owner and liberal factory worker should have different view on some issues, and should be able to wrangle over those, even if they support same political party.

So IGs by themselves represent politics better than PPs by themselves. If political parties are to be added as another layer they should add meaningful complexity.

1. If is true that IG is better for these government forms, is untrue for any democracy/socialist/liberal type of government.

2. This is already showed by the law you choose for the votes. Also devs explained how it will work for France for example with the wealth vote. THe IG can be good to influence political party on this fact we agree, ig can be important for those who have no voting power.

3. you get the same problem with IG, but in addition you have another problem: you have a oversimplification of the representation of the population. Having imaginary groups with imaginary bosses that never existed during history like group of rural folks with their own boss or petite burgoise with their own boss.

I think you can't represent politics after 1900 without political parties into the democracies/proletarian dictaotrship/fascist dictaotorship etc... Cause it was the PP wich shaped the history and wich taken the voices from the streets and the pubs or from the mansions and brought them as policies

Well i guess we can't go more forward then this: we agree to disagree.

 

[SignedName]

Yeah, that's not what I meant. High Literacy = more political participation. High Literacy + poor Laborer frustrated they have no voice in government and police beat them when they try to organize = more political participation by people who want more liberal reforms.

Public Schools causing increased attraction for government Interest Group is a neat idea, thanks!

I think the amount of attraction to the ruling coalition of IGs public schools cause should be dependent on laws costing Authority rather than a general rule (i.e. democracies have a harder time instilling students with state propaganda than a totalitarian state). Same for other things like increased cultural/linguistic assimilation.

 

[Somberg]

I remember that many people protested when they knew there were no political parties in the game. Actually by the number of the disagree i got, i can safely say the forum is invaded by yesmen. I don't read any critics about the shape politics have taken and this confirm me there are many people wich just agree over anything devs say .

But of course there are many people ( wich we saw in a long thread in this forum) who don't want IG rule the politics and parties be just layers.

So reading that the political parties is not nailed down give me still some hope. Please devs don't make political parties just layers, give them the importance they truly had.

Political parties shall be an independent things and IG can influence them externally giving them a boost. IG more were like secret societies, pressure groups of important people, masons, small groups of influential people, but never been anything for the mass politics of the 20th century.

YOu never seen a large social class to act as a whole IG, you never seen all the petite burgoise ask one thing with one voice and one boss, same for rural folks, same for town workers. The most near thing was the estates general in france, but how you represented it in game it's not like that.

It's wrong to represent rural folks as a whole social class having unified domands, it's wrong to represent intelligentsia as a whole social class asking the same things. Victoria have always been a complex game ( not too much complex that was the good side), the best socio-political simulation that anyone can understand.

You can still have an easy to understand game without deleting political parties importance.

I think PP shall get their elections, their parliament, their electoral systems. IG are a great addition, but shall influence PP and not be the foundation of the politics. IG work well in absolute monarchies and military dictatorships alone, but can't be something that hold on a democracy. Victoria 3 can't have the same political depth of EU4, it's a different game, cause IG like i see here are very similar to the EU4 Estates or "factions" of Eu4 special governments.

Or... YOu can do something like democracy 4. YOu need many IG, you need IG for minorities, IG for state workers, IG for militaries, IG for little business owners, IG, for cpaitalist, IG for socialist, conservatives etc... And then the player choose a political party and shape his own policies. Of course this would be complex but revolutionary at same time.

So I get the gist of what you are saying. Part of it is a matter of how the devs have decided to name this mechanic because when I as an American hear the phrase "Interest Group" my mind immediately jumps to things like the NRA or the Sierra Club or even the AARP. Essentially organizations led by a small group of people that are supposed to represent the interests of a larger group and lobby the government on their behalf, usually organized around single issues or a range of issues that affect a specific group.

I think it is more accurate to think of "Interest Groups" in Vicky 3 as the devs have set them up as being more akin to political classes than what you would think of as an "interest group" in the traditional sense. Of course they still have characteristics of traditional interest groups in the sense of having one set of positions on issues and even having some sort of leadership. But at the same time they are composed of many different POPs, too many to be seen as anything akin to a traditional interest group, and the naming scheme also hints to the fact they are supposed to represent classes with IGs like "Petite Bourgeousie" and "Intelligentsia" for example which are literally names for classes of people.

And yes, it is definitely a simplification to treat all the POPs within these IGs as being a monolith that all share agree with each other on all the issues and act with one voice. From a realism standpoint that is just not true, no large group of people all agree with each other on anything. That is certainly one of the issues with IGs as they are currently implemented in the game. There is no representations of factions within an IG that may not share all of the ideologies that characterize the group as a whole but still agree on certain key ones for things like the Intelligentsia being split between liberals and socialists later on in the game or Trade Unions being split between socialists and communists.

The liberal and socialist intelligentsia might both believe in secularism but obviously the socialist intelligentsia will be more concerned with the conditions of the proletariat while the liberal intelligentsia care more about civil liberties and limited government. Socialist and communist trade unions might both support establishing a strong welfare state but the socialist trade unions would want worker cooperatives while the communist trade unions would want government-run industries under a planned economy. Just two examples but you could see how IGs could end up with internal disagreements that currently the game just does not represent.

I think that as a start the system is not bad. It lacks the nuance and complexity that one would hope it would have though. I disagree with you that IGs should not be the foundation of politics, if viewed more as political classes rather than traditional interest groups then they very much ought to be the foundation of politics. Every country has political classes of varying sorts but in democracies these political classes end up establishing parties in order to contest elections and win power so they can push for their shared interests. And of course since POPs within an IG having differing political strength there's also the case that these can end up having what amount to elite POPs that hold a disproportionate share of power compared to other POPs in the IG. That would matter for influencing the overall ideologies of the IG and for representing (potentially) internal factions of some sort.

My hope would be that even if we don't get complexity in the beginning, it's just parties and IGs can only belong to one party and remain monoliths, that there would be an update later on that would add that in. IGs having internal factions and then themselves representing internal factions within political parties would be something I would love to see. Making parties completely independent would preclude this from being a possibility, doubly so because having parties composed of IGs allows a degree of dynamism in the political system that was lacking in Vicky 2 with its static parties with preset policy positions that won power based on the party loyalty of POPs and events and nothing more.

 

[Alfred Dreyfus]

Public Schools causing increased attraction for government Interest Group is a neat idea, thanks!

Great!

 

[Baneslave]

[snip]

And I don't think that any political party is so ideologically pure that all leaders, members and voters agree totally on all issues. If those fractures exist we get back to... Interest Groups. How exciting. But enough of that, as...

Well i guess we can't go more forward then this: we agree to disagree.

Fair enough.

 

[habusibao2021]

Is there a parliamentary system and a cabinet system in Vic3？ I think the Parliament and cabinet mechanism can be a carrier for the operation of interest groups.

 

[naq29]

While each individual within a Pop is considered to support a single Interest Group in this tooltip, functionally there's no difference between 150 people in a 1000-strong Aristocrat Pop giving all their support to the Anglicans and all 1000 individuals providing 15% of their Political Strength to the Anglicans. You can look at it however you like.

But if there is no conflict between the Anglicans and the Landowners, then what prevent the Aristocrat Pop from giving 100% support to both of them? As if the Anglicans have to "compete" with the Landowners for power and influence? Can there be an Anglican Landowners group that unites both groups?

 

[Lys91]

I don't think you should just label these as such. It seems more logical to tie these together with the election laws, with a bonus option for basically one party as "election-fraud-in-all-but-name". Including a "drives towards x parties" in a tooltip would be a good thing, but it shouldn't literally be the name of the law. And who knows, maybe upsets can still happen in the systems.

Something like:
- No elections: Exactly what it says on the tin. Naturally, no parties at all.
- First past the post: The ol' devil. Given time, the system will inevitably end with two parties, with IG's jumping between the two.
- Limited proportional: You'll usually have three or four parties, usually headed by big IG's and joined by others.
- Proportional: AKA, D'Hondt method. You'll end up with at least four parties and it's almost always more. Depending on how much IG's agree with each other, it's possible to have a few big parties, but much more commonly IG's would create their own political parties (with blackjack and opium!) and you'd end up with a splintered political scene.
- Only Correct Votes: In other words, there's only Correct(TM) answers on the ballot, and they're all for the One True Party. Effectively like "No elections", so might not be worth it to separate the two.

Does not cover the voting system in countries such as France.

 

[Hertzila]

Does not cover the voting system in countries such as France.

I wasn't trying to exhaustively list every single possibility. It was more "How this could be done" and not "This exact list and nothing else should be added to the game". Hence me starting that with "Something like". The devs are free to add and remove stuff to make the game better. We're all just throwing ideas.

But since we're on the topic, it's not that hard to add "Runoff voting" to the list. Tends towards having two big parties like normal FPTP, but small parties also exist and won't automatically get squashed by the big ones.

 

[sandro chronicler]

With sistem like that some unusual regional quirks could be taken into account, in particular unusually big proportion of noble class in Poland)
And, it would be interesting to create some oddities, for example socialist-aristocracy (obsessed with Noblesse oblige concept)

 

[Lapoleon]

But if there is no conflict between the Anglicans and the Landowners, then what prevent the Aristocrat Pop from giving 100% support to both of them? As if the Anglicans have to "compete" with the Landowners for power and influence? Can there be an Anglican Landowners group that unites both groups?

If they are exactly the same and there is no conflict than it wouldn't even matter since you'd get the same results. Otherwise it's simply a matter of mathematics. You can't spend all of your time both lobbying for the goals of the land owning class and for your religious goals. If you spread out your time than both get 50%.

 

[minimouse007]

i am not sure if it was posted here earlier, but... can leaders have a more skill-leveled approach too?

one of the key things in politics is definitely charisma, decisiveness and cunning. It allows for leaders to react better to events and i would say this makes up at least third or even more of current political influence, it is just usually balanced out well enough not to be super visible. A political group's influence usually depended a lot on the responses they made to political events, and these responses nearly always came from leadership, thus, a leader's skill being the most influential in these moments of crisis. Ofc, it shouldn't actually be more influential than the base power, it is like rolling in DnD: you have a base modifier from 0 to 20, but you can also roll with a 1d10.

One of the interesting aspect of this skill is how leadership of different political groups is chosen. This often depends on the internal hierarchies: since every political group had some sort of inner political hierarchy, it was never perfect, but it usually depended a lot on the usual hierarchies: nobility's political groups had more hierarchic leadership (and thus on average less skilled leaders), while clergy is deeply hierarchic too, it already has far more skill-based advancements (popes are usually better than average politicians, surprise....). Obviously, the better averages went to the least hierarhic, and usually more populist-ish groups, liberal, leftists or (don t kill me) rightist reactionaries. Obviously, since all of these groups still have different inner hierarchic structures (although these can be very different), it meant that they still weren t some magical good-politicians creators, but they were still better.

hopefully these leaders with their skill can have more of an impact. this impact should accumulate over time towards a max barrier, but this would totally bring more life into the democratic systems too, where an appearance of a highly skilled politician could change the landscape quite a bit, like it did , historically

 

[SignedName]

Just came to mind, but could there be laws in place that give certain Interest Groups a guaranteed minimum level of influence? For example, the House of Lords in the UK giving influence to the Landed Gentry (Landowners) and to a lesser extent the Church of England (Pious), perhaps with various different laws determining the composition of the Upper House. For example: Peerage (only Landowners), Lords Spiritual and Temporal (mix of Landowners and Pious), Religious Jurists (only Pious, primarily seen in Muslim countries), Senate/Federal Council (Upper House apportioned according to strength of different IGs in each Incorporated State, as opposed to nationally), and No Upper House (self-explanatory).

 

[Lorehead]

If you want two parties to emerge naturally from a first-past-the-post system, you could introduce some strategic voting into the AI. Then parties can split and you can get big shake-ups like in the US in 1860 or 1912, but the voters will sort themselves back into two major parties before long.

 

[naq29]

If they are exactly the same and there is no conflict than it wouldn't even matter since you'd get the same results. Otherwise it's simply a matter of mathematics. You can't spend all of your time both lobbying for the goals of the land owning class and for your religious goals. If you spread out your time than both get 50%.

They can be totally different so there is no conflict. The Anglicans don't need to care about land ownership while the Landowners don't need to ask for religious schooling. They are interest groups, not political parties, so they only need to care for their direct interests.

What conflict should there be? The Anglicans support land reform while the Landowners are against it? Which means some Aristocrats that belong to the Anglicans interest group are against their own interest? That would make no sense.

I am not sure about the time-spending argument. So you mean an atheist Aristocrat pop will make Landowners stronger than a devout one? Because they spend 24/7 lobbying for that only group? Why does it need to be so?