Oooh interesting. Are you suggesting adding this to the voter details strips on the LHS of the main UI? Its definitely yet another way of looking at things. This also handles another paradox that people encounter in the game which is:
“Socialists all hate me, but they all vote for me anyway”.
Which is a true phenomena, assuming everyone is only 51% socialist, and are 95% patriotic, and you have strong patriotic policies, and vastly anti-socialist policies. Right now those voter strips just show the happiness of that group as a theoretical entity that is only in one group, whereas the real world implications are different.
(This does get shown in the happiness breakdown for the group, but we don’t put a number on it).
There again…drawing attention to confusing anomalies in the game is probably bad!
I wouldn’t recommend it for the current build of the game. I’m only recommending this as something to draw from if you ever start adding content for an active opposition. In such a case the voters would be considering the merits of different candidates rather than just judging the player.
In the example I provided there are 35 candidates for the electors to choose from, and each elector is calculating their opinion of each of them. The game then shows either their top pick if it’s the same as mine, or their top pick and my pick for side by side comparison.
If something like this were added to Democracy 4 than the voter detail window would need to be reorganized to make tabs available to view the block’s opinion of each party. To transfer this over to my hypothetical example of the green vote not supporting the player despite 70% approval, the voter window would need to clearly display “Supporting party X” with a very inviting tab to see why. From there the player would see a giant green opinion bar for what green voters think of this opposition party’s promise to ban coal.
To me this has been a blind spot in your Democracy games since I found the series at Democracy 3. The utter passiveness of the opposition parties feels like missing content. I recognize that this would be no small thing to add, but you did mention that you are looking for DLC ideas.
And very patriotic policies also include economic nationalism, autarkism, etc. Which some socialists like.
Just to give an extreme example, the Nazi party had a faction which they called the Beefsteak Nazis, or Strasserists, who put the “Socialist” into “National Socialist”, so before they were purged, they were urging for a revolution to overthrow the capitalist system and establish Socialism (along with economic antisemitism of course).
Ultranationalist Socialists or left-fascists are totally a thing.