Political Party Membership

Hey everyone,

I am not sure if this has been brought up before, or if this is the right place to post it, but the starting strength for political membership is way off for many countries. I appreciate that in Democracy 3 I can change the name of political parties without party membership altering at the start of a game, but there are some serious concerns about the starting strength of parties in some countries.

For example, if I select the United States and set my party as “The Democrats” and the opposition party as “The Republicans” the game starts with the Democrats having 6.1 million members and the Republicans having 78.2 million members. The real-life percentage, based on a Gallop poll I looked up, should be something in the neighborhood of 31% Democrat and 27% Republican, with the rest identifying as Independents. If you take the time you can get the registered political party numbers from each state since its all public data. The point is, the current starting point for the simulation is way off from the political reality of the U.S. And even if you flip your starting party to the Republicans and then have the Democrats as the opposition, the problem repeats itself in the reverse where the Republicans have 6.1 million members and the Democrats have 78.2 million members.

I haven’t gone far in to some of the other nation’s yet but the same problem also plays out in Germany where whatever political party you start with has a sizable lead over the opposition. Now that real nations are being used in Democracy 3, I think it will be a lot more enjoyable to portray these countries with realistic political representation. Are there any plans in the work to make this more realistic during the beta?

Hi, this would not be possible without completely re-engineering everything. Political party memberships vary dramatically throughout the western world. in the UK it is laughably low, and no single simulation could effectively manage to represent the different way politics works to that level in such widely differing countries.
You will find many of the stats are not exactly as the real world stands right now, it’s an approximation, not a direct simulation of the actual data.