One thing to remember when talking about modifiers to force or incentivize an empire's strata into specific proportions is that it can backfire greatly.
In the example where you have more productive elites and less productive workers, one concern would be that instead of, as you suggested, the player employing a few powerful elites and having large numbers of workers, the meta would become an economy entirely made up of elites and then relying on space mining and solar panels for basic resources.
Yeah, that part is more speculative and mostly a separate issue from upgrading the Authority Type system.
The Corporate Authority would also benefit from being able to select election types. The idea for a Family-Owned corporation would have the Imperial succession type. A sole-proprietor would be Dictatorial. Worker's Cooperative could require Democratic or Spokesperson.
I included a brief mention of the Corporate Authority:
"The separation of Authority Type and Election Type also means that Corporate empires could use the entire range of Election Types, limited by ethics. There could be megacorps that are owned by a single, hereditary dynasty, or megacorps where political factions vie for influence."
(Besides a desire to keep things simple, another reason why I limited the mentions of Corporate in the original post is that I personally think it might work better as a "civilisation type" or permanent civic. Or that it needs its own set of corporate authority types. Either solution would allow the player to pick any authority level, and not be stuck with only an alternate version of Oligarchic. This may be especially important if Authority Type handles the baselines for Political Power.)
-------
That being said, now I think that perhaps Oligarchic/Corporate could have access to the full range of Election Types. It could be one of their gimmicks. A hereditary oligarchy could represent some kind of feudal monarchy, while a Speaker oligarchy could represent a federal republic. Corporate could then similarly have access to the full range of election types, at least.
I am also thinking about whether
some of the Empire Effects could be moved to Election Type, such as the Leader Pool Size modifiers and the special Oligarchic and Democratic election effects. This would allow Constitutional Autocracy to use Oligarchic elections (i.e. 20 years) and thereby get access to the Emergency Elections feature, while Direct Democracy could get the "elections reset policy & reform cooldowns" benefit of democratic elections.
A lot of effort went into writing and formatting the OP so kudos for doing so and admittedly the Authorities do need a fresh coat of paint. My question to you is how do all the Advanced Authorities fit into all of this? Namely if I’m a Representative Democracy and take Genetic(Cloning), what impact, if any, will that have?
I quite like this idea!
But in order for this to work, they would first have to fix the nonsense that is "Advanced Authorities". They abused the Authority system, which is primarily supposed to determine things like type of ruler and elections, by shoehorning in civic-like (primarily numerical) effects that don't affect authority or elections. Not to mention things like the Synthetic Physical Authorities unlocking modularity traits (Why would you do that?!).
They will have to pull those effects out again in order to properly expand the system.
I feel like most Advanced Authorities could be reworked as "Ascension Civics" and have their own slot.
In many cases the Advanced Authorities don't have a meaningfully different governing structure than traditional authorities, in terms of story they are just the traditional authority with some laws relevant to your Ascension Path in effect. ie the Democracy Cloning authority is just a Democracy where clones and natural born citizens explicitly have equal rights.
Some rebalancing/rewriting would be needed, but I think it's doable.
Long term this would open up more flexibility with how your ascension path influences your government since you might have options for multiple ascension civics that could be changed later in the game.
I am very inclined to agree with the idea that the "Advanced Authorities" should be turned into civics, similar to
Divine Sovereign and
Galactic Sovereign (which also give an additional civic slot). Or perhaps Stellaris simply needs a new mini-system for housing special authority subtypes like that. Perhaps
Galactic Administration could unlock such "Advanced Authorities", including a default vanilla set for non-ascended muggles to choose from.
