Check it out:
When you think about it, there is a big gap between voting intention and voter approval. If I approve of the government at a rate of 49%, I’ll be more inclined to vote for ‘the other party’ but increase my approval to 51% (a 2% swing) and I’ll vote for the incumbent,
Until now, the game only ever showed you voting intention on that graph, so the ‘popularity’ (as players tend to refer to it) seemed to swing really wildly and confused players. I think adding both lines to this chart makes it clearer what’s going on.
Of course the extent of the correlation between the two lines is dependent on the demographics and policies and thus how wide a range of opinions the electorate has, so its pretty complex, but combining this with the new post-election vote analysis screen will hopefully give the player much more insight into what the electorate think of them.
This will go into version 1.30.