I experimented with a Suffrage Age mod in D1, however the only thing I could think of for it to do is make “Everyone” happier (since there were less people to vote against you) and that didn’t seem right. Any way this could be implemented better in D2?
Comments, etc:
I assume a high suffrage age would upset the Liberal group.
What about Conservatives? Would they favor a high age (opposite to Liberals) or not be too bothered about this?
I guess a low suffrage age could upset the Retired group (“them youngsters messing up our country”, etc).
Finally I imagine this would require a very high political cost as this isn’t something that changes very often!
how about a policy to introduce voting machines? (we dont have them in the UK), it could please big business (capitalists) and upset everyone else 
This does open up the question of having policies that change the total voting population - concerning female suffrage, suffrage age, blocks to vote e.t.c.
technically, a policy could just disable membership of an entire group, by reducing their freq to zero. So you could in theory have something that banned retired people from voting or the poor, for that matter. Might provoke serious riots though…
Would this method not simply reduce membership to zero?
If someone had the voter types poor/liberal/parent/motorist and you drop poor freq to zero this person would surely become a liberal/parent/motorist and they would still be voting based on those groups? Not actually banned from voting but simply ignoring the fact that they are really poor.
This is unless I’ve misunderstood the way the game handles membership level changes, which is quite possible…
Although you probably couldn’t make a mod do this, dropping the voting age would reduce turnout percentage, as younger people are generally less likely to vote, especially I should imagine those aged 16 and 17, and therefore you’d be adding a large amount of people to the voting population but only increasing the amount who actually vote very slightly.
DMA57361 - You are right in what you say. Reducing the frequency of one group is not the same as reducing the voting population of a particular group. They would just vote as one of the other groups they were in.
Maybe it would be worth trying (if it is possible ?) to change the default membership percentage value of the Everyone group in the VoterTypes.csv file from 1 (100%) to ,say, 0.9 . Then lowering the suffrage age could increase the membership back to 100 percent. I think it would be ideal to remove the upper cap of 100% on this group, then suffrage age could increase it even further,to 120% for example.
Ok, i modified the votertypes.csv file by disabling the overriden joins in All group and setting its default memebership to 0.85, i also changed its name from Evryone to All Voters.
Next, i added “All,1.0” modifier after every other voter group modifiers. It now seems to work ok. There are still no voters with no membership in the All Voters group in the other groups, but the All Voters membership freq may change. I think the suffrage age should also modify slightly memberships in other groups.
I am not sure however if this modification has any real game effects beside cosmetic ones, cliffski?
votertypescsv.rar (3.58 KB)
The everyone group is not people who vote, but literally everyone. Your changes will reduce membership of that group, but everyone will still vote. The voting decision is based on stuff like voting compulsion, happiness, party membership, but there are no moddable direct factors there.
It would be an interesting idea though. Especially because even in a situation where people can’t vote, they can still riot, and still pay taxes…
Why effect membership?
Couldn’t it just force effect turnout? Say the poor don’t vote (whether or not you just hid their votes), that way you could still get assassinated for making this group very unhappy and collect revenue from certain groups (drinker, motorists, and smoker (wealthy I’m not sure) membership effect some taxes).
You need a youth demographic for this policy to actually have any relevance though, maybe get rid of small business or trade unionists (its impossible to really please them with policies anyway, only dilemmas).
if I do democracy 3, I really need to rethink the whole object model of the game, because the variable ‘turnout probability’ could easily just be a node targeted by policies. It’s not currently coded like that, but it could be, and that would be pretty cool. The same is true of the level of fanaticism of each voter, this should also be directly addressable by mods and code.