Latest Developer blog video #19: USA!

Democracy 4 General Discussion
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Wow, lots of varied topics in this thread!

I think we are covering the policing ‘regime’ stuff by the extent to which a country implements and funds stuff like tear gas, rubber bullets, tasers and water cannons etc. The assumption in the game is that the normal ‘police’ is people who chase after muggers, who stop people driving dangerously, who attend drunken brawls in bars etc. For stuff like protests and riots and so-on, thats where all those dedicated policies are more relevant.
FWIW I do intend to add a new policy for a drug enforcement agency,

Other topics:
Sure, technology does not reduce religious membership noticeably in the USA, but our model is a generic one for all countries, and very technologically primitive countries in the developing world do have this connection. There are still countries where people earnestly pray for rainfall, and where they place shrines to gods at dangerous road junctions instead of crash barriers (seen em myself!).
Also this is a general policy where it represents how deep religious belief can be a drag on research, such as stem cells, cloning etc.

Re: incarceration & voting. This is a VERY good point. The disenfranchisement of voters likely does skew elections in some US states and we are not modelling this. Perhaps a high level of crime combined with voter restrictions should reduce voter-turnout for the poor? although that implies only the poor are incarcerated… so tricky.

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This is very true of course. But the issue with that is, that those other religions also may have extremely different beliefs about what’s moral or not and what, as a result, they would be upset by, and the game right now seems to model mostly Abrahamic beliefs.

And also, I don’t think it’s wrong to have religious membership drop at least somewhat in the face of science. However, it ought to be extremely hard to literally eradicate religious people from the voter pool. And that’s true for anywhere, not just the US.
(Similarly, a single policy such as trade union restrictions where you can outright ban the one voting group upset by this, seems not right to me: That’d be active suppression after all. Just because people aren’t allowed to exist, doesn’t mean they don’t, in fact, exist. They’ll just get super disgruntled about it, and increasingly militant.)

Honestly that’s not that bad an approximation. Fates like this very rarely befall rich people. They tend to have ways to make problems disappear, and they tend to fall under less scrutiny, at least of this kind, in the first place. A lot of it seems to fall under Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. Until it becomes a very public scandal or what ever.
Maybe it could be a mix of each income group, but middle income count like a tenth of poor, and rich count like a tenth of middle income?