I love this game, but electoral democracy is not being modeled - governance is though - and rather well.
I feel that there are way too many swing voters in the game! One shouldn’t be able to get above 45% with a major party in the UK - in order to be the largest party with less than 50% of the vote another column could be introduced to deal with “other” parties’ support.
In the UK the two main parties should get support at the start of the game from roughly 28-43% of the electorate, with “others” and non voters making up a significant rest of the electorate. Hypothetically, over time perhaps ones core vote could be increased so one gets up to 50% (by shaping society over many terms), although this is highly improbable of course! I don’t understand how one can win elections in this game with 90% of the vote when only a small proportion of the electorate in the UK are “swing” voters?
If I controlled Labour or Conservatives I would be delighted with: 40% for me, 35% main opposition, 25% other parties! I want to celebrate every 1% I win over. As it is, elections are ridiculous.
I must stress I love other elements of this game, but I really think the electoral side needs an over-haul, to allow for a solid core vote for each party, a small group of swing voters, an “other” voters column (to allow for victory when one has less than 50% of the vote as in ALL UK elections), and realistic levels of support for the two main parties.
Even in the (two-party) United States, support levels should not go above 60% for a party (very generous) or below 40% for the loser! I would love elections to operate in a much tighter band - around 1-10% difference between main parties, 15% in extreme cases! What do you guys reckon? Sorry for giving UK as the main example - I am a British swing voter! LOL
I couldn’t agree more. Consistently winning 60, 70, 80, or 98 percent of the electorate takes away a lot of the challenge of political survival. The parties I run against should be way more competitive. The opposition seems to just run as the opposite of me, which means super easy victories as long as electoral blocs aren’t roughly 50:50.
I agree. In most of my games, even on harder difficulties, it only takes me a couple of elections to become a de facto one party state. For most of my games my popularity rates >90% and stays there. It would be better if there was a sort of manifesto system whereby halfway through your term you have to out together a list of promises which can swing voters. The challenging part would be that so would your opponents.
I think having opposition manifestos would be a great way to make the game more challenging. If we posit in real life a party that popular there are still going to be some unpopular policies. All an opposition party has to do to get into power would be to agree with you on all the things you’re doing right and disagree on the rest and they would steal a hefty proportion of the votes.
Whilst democracy 3 is a fantastic game I do feel that there could be more realistic, and complicated, modelling of government including electoral reform, gerrymandering, manifestos and perhaps even playing as the opposition.
I guess one of the fundamental reasons things are a bit skewed is that policies make people happy with no decrease over time. I’ve been thinking about that a lot recently with the socialist groups. I regularly post on socialist forums and the prevailing opinion is always that social democracy is, at best, a gateway to socialism. It’s not actually socialist (it’s more well regulated capitalism). So whilst many socialists might be happy if a lot of the leftest policies in Democracy 3 come into effect they wouldn’t be content for it to stay like that.