So, I just want to preface this by saying that I absolutely love Democracy 3 and the work so far done on Democracy 4 and have loved the developer blogs put out so far. (I particularly love the economic realism and the changes to political capital).
One of the only problems I have with Democracy 3 is that I don’t really feel like I’m playing against anyone else when it comes to elections. It doesn’t feel like there actually is an opposition party that is actually fighting me and making manifesto pledges and doing stuff of their own. So I have been thinking about what I have wanted to see the most in Democracy 4 and I think I have come up with a solution to this problem. Firstly, I think that the opposition party should have its own manifesto and place on the political compass, adapting to your weaknesses. For example, if you were running a socialist, high-taxes government, the opposition may start pledging for scrapping corporation tax and lowering state health service spending. Therefore, the opposition would feel like a real threat that was also doing stuff and responding to your changes. Also, I think that you could also run ads attacking your opponent based on their manifesto pledges. In conclusion, whilst I would love to see full on partliamentary democracy, I believe that this is the next best alternative.