Observations

Democracy 4
1

Hi, I recently started playing Democracy 4 and here are 2 observations I made:

  • The carbon tax is one of the most expensive policies to implement in terms of political capital. I don’t think this corresponds to reality.

  • In the games I have started the doctors’ strike happened in the second or third turn. Surprisingly there are very few things I can do to address the strike. It would seem that as the governement, especially with a state health service, I can address their demands more directly ie higher pay, fewer work hours etc.

2

Higher pay / fewer work hours is implicit in higher healthcare spending, so that’s one of the clearest ways to help here.
Addressing obesity is gonna indirectly help as well as healthcare demand is gonna go down as a result.
And another thing you could do, if you want to go that route, is to make it harder to strike. For instance, you could make labor laws be pro-employee, or you could ban trade unions.

It’s indeed quite hard to outright avoid, but I think that’s kind of by design: The UK right now, as far as I know, is stretching its healthcare awfully thin and resulting strikes aren’t that unlikely.

Also Carbon Tax has historically been extremely difficult to enact, I think. Really anything to do with tangible policies towards climate change has.
That being said, I do think that maybe political capital requirements ought to be somewhat variable. I’d imagine support for a measure like that to grow overtime, so it’d become increasingly easy to do, especially once it’s an actual problem. Like, climate strikes might make anything to do with the environment a little (perhaps just one or two points) easier to pass because, say, the opposition might be inclined to go for it, so you effectively need less absolute power to still get things done.