While I very much like what I’ve seen in the game, I have to wonder: why not include various dirty tricks? After all, democracies aren’t exempt from the personal use (or misuse, depending upon your perspective) of power, to keep one’s government in office. Far from it. What about creating a series of special sleaze tactics that could be used with various constituency groups or opponents, as needed, but which would include a small but ever-increasing possibility of being caught as used–with a large fallout from some constituencies?
Take blackmail. You could potentially use blackmail to quiet a scandal, but there’s always the possibiilty that the media will get a whiff of this. Or nepotism: you could use it to reward a financial backer with office. Leak a story to the press that makes an opponent look very bad.
I really like this idea. Its’ like announcing a policy change, but actually never seeing uit through, and just hoping it doesn’t become too obvious. You could have an element of risk for each sleazy policy, so it would be like gambling. Maybe if you muzzled the press enough, it would reduce the chances of being caught out. it might even be possible to mod, given that being caught out would effectively be an event that would be triggered by sufficiently high sleaze, and the effect would be a large short term negative on the everyone group…
I like that. You could include a chance, though, of a muzzled press causing samizdat, a private, self-published subversive current of literature, to spring up, too–probably on the Web.
Might cause some cabinet reshuffling, loss of faith in you from your party, potential international repercussions, etc. Though all this is blue-skying.
As an extension of this a little bit, how about playing the media, so say if a political opponent, or atleast a spokesman for a group not very happy, and trying to get something out of you, is trying to play something, a problem up in the media, you would have the option of either capitulating to his/their demands, or you could take a calculated risk, and state in the media that the political opponent is just scare-mongering, depending on how pressing the problem is, people may buy it, thinking the problem isn’t really a problem, meaning you can either ignore it and hope it won’t explode, or it’ll give you more time to quietly fix it before any ill affects (on your popularity) from it are felt.
Or the flip-side, down playing a problem to big, may be seen as you being out of touch with the voters and there concerns, and not control of the situation.
To fully introduce all this, it maybe neccesary to have some kind of gauge of how truth full people see you as.