Do Interest Groups serve a purpose anymore?

[LAF1994]

Since Political Movements have been added into the game, it's not clear what the point is of having the Interest Group system. Interest Groups basically just arbitrarily straightjacket socioeconomic categories into particular political stances, which is unrealistic and makes the political mechanics of the game too inflexible. You could easily just have political parties bound to movements rather than IGs.

 

[praftd]

I disagree. Political parties are not ideological entities despite what people seem to believe. They are collections of power blocs and interest groups that direct themselves towards a unified goal/goals within a political space. They are inherently political, not ideological. And this, in turn, is what people falsely interpret as an ideology. Plenty of people serve parties only to meet their own goals, not serve and ideological purpose. Or an ideological person antithetical to the outwardly proclaimed goals of a party.

Political parties should not be inherently tied to movements because movements are ideological activity of blocs of people that exist outside the political machine. Political parties can support them, but they aren't directly linked together.

Occupy Wallstreet was not a political movement or a party movement. It was a movement of interest groups.

If anything, I think there aren't enough interest groups and they are too broad. Like "Devout" is extremely reductive to the various of religious blocs beliefs and goals. Or Trade Unions seemingly been a catch all for everything socialist.

 

[Amina144]

Well this is reserved for internal politics rework. IGs are functional enough for now to represent power structure of your nation, but its purpose ends there. My problem with it is that it splits the power of pops and it cant represent more than one issue. For example a population cant really have both religious moral interest and economic interest, this usually happens with Rural Folk and the Devout. It just means your country becomes godless atheists. So something like Pakistan cant really exist where you have republic with multiple ideological parties that all follow Islam, especially when you consider it was founded by mixed Ulema-Intelligentsia. Same with other IGs like the Armed Forces, even when I tried to play game where I tried to stack as much bonuses I can to empower them they still get dwarfed by the much more powerful economic IGs like PB and TU.

Right now, political movements exist just to add some flexibility to the very rigid IG system, because otherwise they have put too much emphasis on making one dude flip ideology trait.

 

[LAF1994]

If anything, I think there aren't enough interest groups and they are too broad. Like "Devout" is extremely reductive to the various of religious blocs beliefs and goals. Or Trade Unions seemingly been a catch all for everything socialist.

The main problem with how Interest Groups work in Vic3 is that they require a belief that broad socioeconomic strata act as unified entities with fixed ideologies, a model which makes no sense historically.

 

[Hopciu]

Since Political Movements have been added into the game, it's not clear what the point is of having the Interest Group system. Interest Groups basically just arbitrarily straightjacket socioeconomic categories into particular political stances, which is unrealistic and makes the political mechanics of the game too inflexible. You could easily just have political parties bound to movements rather than IGs.

Yes, I fully agree. I've posted about it in here:

With Movements rework, aren't Interest Groups obsolete?

Currently, Movements can represent everything IGs were supposed to do, but better. They are more flexible (compared to Aristocrats that still want Serfdom back in 1936, PB going from Traditional to Nihilist overnight when leader dies, or...

forum.paradoxplaza.com

Basically, Pops Proffesion determine who they are, and Movements determine wgat are their political views. IGs fall somewhere in between, trying to represent both things, but worse. Currently they just add unnecessary confusion, and burden the performance. Political Parties and Governments/Opposition could easily use Movements as their base units, in place of IGs.

 

[Helmut von Dandy]

I think it makes sense to categorise pops based on their shared material interests. There's still interesting things that can be done with that, it's just that the way government and political parties specifically bind the entire group together feels unrealistic. There should be some shared baseline ideologies for interest groups, and it makes sense how laws can shift political strength on that level, but the politics of pops within interest groups should be more varied. I'd like to see political parties formed from movements, rather than entire interest groups.

 

[marmot01]

Since Political Movements have been added into the game, it's not clear what the point is of having the Interest Group system. Interest Groups basically just arbitrarily straightjacket socioeconomic categories into particular political stances, which is unrealistic and makes the political mechanics of the game too inflexible. You could easily just have political parties bound to movements rather than IGs.

IGs behave like political parties. Lots of confusion-inducing and unintuitive design decisions here. It's a societal slice but somehow it is either "in government" or "in opposition"? They behave like parties, but somehow they are not parties, and instead they can group and ungroup into entities called "parties"? And somehow this societal group has a "leader", but he is an active politician, but he is a "leader" of a "non-party", lol? An absolutist Russia switches IGs in and out of government the same way a constitutional monarchy Britain, a republican France or any tribal nation? Quite a mess.

 

[OxfordNik]

I disagree. Political parties are not ideological entities despite what people seem to believe. They are collections of power blocs and interest groups that direct themselves towards a unified goal/goals within a political space. They are inherently political, not ideological. And this, in turn, is what people falsely interpret as an ideology. Plenty of people serve parties only to meet their own goals, not serve and ideological purpose. Or an ideological person antithetical to the outwardly proclaimed goals of a party.

Political parties should not be inherently tied to movements because movements are ideological activity of blocs of people that exist outside the political machine. Political parties can support them, but they aren't directly linked together.

Occupy Wallstreet was not a political movement or a party movement. It was a movement of interest groups.

If anything, I think there aren't enough interest groups and they are too broad. Like "Devout" is extremely reductive to the various of religious blocs beliefs and goals. Or Trade Unions seemingly been a catch all for everything socialist.

I concur. Hopefully this will all get fixed in a future internal politics rework (which I'm guessing/hoping is going to include more character-driven gameplay, given the hints dropped about company execs getting more interesting things to do in the future).

Personally I, too, would prefer it if the larger IGs have the option/possibility of splitting into sub-categories (which, depending on your political setup, would be able to join different parties).

For instance, US landowners (pre-Civil War) shouldn't all just be Southern Planters, and late game Intelligentsia/PB shouldn't just all be one vast swathe (regional variation could play a part here, especially if e.g. the US senate were better represented).

Likewise in early game Russia, the super powerful Landowners could be split between traditionalists and reformers, for instance - and later on, the Trade Unions could be split between full-on communists and more democratic socialist-types.

 

[Claudius84]

Interest groups = elites
Political movement = the man on the street (possibly influenced by an agitator)

 

[strattonthebard]

While obviously the system has many problems I think interest groups form a pretty solid basis and generally more useful than not. While obviously politics and idealogy has always been more complicated than material interests based on economic class it's a good starting point and the game already complicates it somewhat as pops of the same economic class can potentially be attracted to multiple different IGs based on various factors. And in a game where the primary thing players do is manage the economy, politics fundamentally rooted in the structure of your economy makes the most gameplay sense and gives the player the most levers to work with.

 

[L-Histidine]

There'll come a time when we/the dev team will need to think hard about what IGs are supposed to do within the simulation.

IGs are an attempt to reflect a class analysis, but behave weirdly in multiple ways. The following is only a partial list, with points that have doubtless been made elsewhere (some in this very thread):

Spoiler

• It mixes a few analytical lenses, resulting in categories that don't always fit together neatly (e.g. being religious isn't a social class on the same axis that distinguishes business owners from workers).
• People with the same nominal class aren't going to hold the same position on various issues. Even/especially ones that involve material conditions.
  • e.g. Is opposing kingship really a defining trait of the intellectual class? If foreign exporters are dumping iron on the local market, will the iron mine owners and the steel mill owners still share an opinion on Protectionism vs. Free Trade?
• What does it even mean for an IG to be 'in' or 'out' of government? Does anyone claim that real political parties are comprised entirely of people from 1-3 of these social groupings?
• Especially given the historical materialist lens generally embodied by the concept, the IG leader being able to completely reverse the opinion of millions of people on potentially multiple issues sure is a trip.
• "Every country always has the same 8 IGs" leads to... odd representation of some countries, shall we say.
  • It's not clear to me that Qing's 'scholar-officials', 'Confucian scholars' and 'literati' don't actually represent the exact same people
  • Joseon has something even funnier, the description text of Yangban officials (their flavor Landowners) tells me that this IG covers landed and unlanded gentry. So... Landowners who don't own land.

I'd argue that if we keep IGs, they ought to serve as an underlying substrate of politics instead of its principal vehicle.
Half-baked concept: Parties are a grouping of movements, serving as a tent for pops to push a not-necessarily-coherent slate of policies. Parties, not IGs, have leaders (and exist even in non-electoral government systems). IGs pressure parties into adopting their ideologies, instead of movements pressuring IGs.

 

[Nickoteen]

I feel like one of the weaker aspects of Victoria 3 is how little engagement is really needed with political movements and their demands. Most of the time, you can largely ignore political agitation unless you're actively trying to suppress a specific group. There's rarely any real pressure to make compromises or carefully weigh the political cost of your reforms — it's mostly just a matter of time.


On top of that, welfare systems like universal health care or social security are far too cheap to implement and maintain. There’s almost no meaningful economic trade-off involved. You can just unlock them and enjoy the benefits with barely any long-term consequences. It ends up making these decisions feel less impactful than they should be.


It would be much more interesting if these policies came with more substantial and persistent costs — not just in bureaucracy or authority, but in actual economic strain. That way, you'd have to seriously consider whether your nation can sustain them or if it's too early to make the jump. Likewise, tying these reforms more tightly to political movements would create more dynamic internal politics and a stronger feeling of navigating competing interests, which is really at the heart of what Victoria should be about.

 

[ruhrbaron]

I disagree. Political parties are not ideological entities despite what people seem to believe. They are collections of power blocs and interest groups that direct themselves towards a unified goal/goals within a political space. They are inherently political, not ideological. And this, in turn, is what people falsely interpret as an ideology. Plenty of people serve parties only to meet their own goals, not serve and ideological purpose. Or an ideological person antithetical to the outwardly proclaimed goals of a party.

Political parties should not be inherently tied to movements because movements are ideological activity of blocs of people that exist outside the political machine. Political parties can support them, but they aren't directly linked together.

Occupy Wallstreet was not a political movement or a party movement. It was a movement of interest groups.

If anything, I think there aren't enough interest groups and they are too broad. Like "Devout" is extremely reductive to the various of religious blocs beliefs and goals. Or Trade Unions seemingly been a catch all for everything socialist.

IGs are more in need of a rework than before 1.9 imho. Executives kinda break clout... particularly if u play with extra company slots but even if u dont, uber successful companies produce so much wealth that in turn gives so much clout to the pops owning them and IG leader's that it gets very silly very quickly. i had a corporate state run where i gave my self even more companies to work with and ended up marginalizing everyone but the PB, industrialist and armed forces (thanks to their numerous generals...) and that was on universal suffrage where based on voter attraction the rural folk and trade unions beat the PB in terms of membership...

i think it's correct to include wealth in clout calculations but companies make it a bit silly once they start breaking into the 1M+ earnings per week territory.

for that reason, ive only seen radicals be successful, after some point in the game there are just no revolutions anymore unless the country is doing really poorly. a bit more mean reversion would be nice, i guess

 

[strattonthebard]

Companies being so successful that they make capitalists wealthy beyond the imagining of prior generations and give them absurd political clout is very historical, but probably shouldn't really kick into gear until around the 1880s or so

 

[MrNoobomnenie]

One thing Paradox should certainly do is to add more dynamic ways for IGs to change their "core" ideologies, dependent of socio-economic situation in the country. One thing this could be done is to keep track of from which professions comes of majority of the IG's political power - Landowners, for an example, should stop favoring Serfdom and Land-Based Taxation once a noticeable part of their clout is consisting of wealthy Farmers rather than Aristocrats.

 

[FranklyJustNess]

As many people mentioned, movements are there to represent pops outside political establishment, so the purpose is a bit different.

I do believe however, we will need to see some changes to IGs and parties, as both are quite meh.

Main problem with IGs is really just how influential the leader is on the ideology. Change them and suddenly a huge part of the clout in your country just has a different take on an issue. It both can feel very gamey with how strong it is (Corn Laws) or very restrictive (how Fascism was very hard to get, because getting a Fascist leader in like 10-15 years was very difficult).

Parties on the other hand a are a huge placeholder. They don't care about any issues, they don't have agendas, they don't care about their chances to win or resulting legitimacy, they just weirdly glue together IGs. It works, but I'd be surprised if it wasn't on radar to be completely reworked. And I think using a Movement-like mechanic to represent that, would actually be really good.

 

[ruhrbaron]

Companies being so successful that they make capitalists wealthy beyond the imagining of prior generations and give them absurd political clout is very historical, but probably shouldn't really kick into gear until around the 1880s or so

i'd be fine with that, particularly for some good old gilded age content, buuuuut, it is weird how clout just makes votes disappear even under universal/ census sufferage. ive played around with mods increasing the company limit and accidentally marginalized everyone but the PB and industrialists. leading to permanent 100% legitimacy. Now that isnt intended but the effect is so big that it even affects vanilla games, as you note.

i'm not sure how to improve the current system fundamentally without introducing other issues, however

 

[Imp0815]

I wish we could psyop custom movements into existence to push for certain laws.

 

[marmot01]

Interest groups = elites
Political movement = the man on the street (possibly influenced by an agitator)

That would have made sense if they didn't partake in elections, with events boosting their power, clearly talking of them as parties.

 

[praftd]

After thinking about it, I've realized interest groups in v3 aren't actually ideologies, they are classes. Classes largely based on Marxist theory (Land owners, petit bourgeoisie, etc). And those classes are inherently tied to certain ideologies.

Personally i think there shouls be more classes and there needs to be an ideological layer underneath seperate. A trade unionist shouldn't inherently support socialism even if most might.

Many religous people have had socialist/anarchic leanings like in Spain.