What about election turnout?

It looks like the election assumes that 100% of the elctorate turnout to vote. is thir right? Of course, you can’t model everything in a game, but it would be nice if electoral turnout became a factor in winning the next election. When things are doing badly, I’m pretty much certain I’ll lose the enxt lection 9which is quite often!) but in real life, I guess I could be saved by a poor turnout for the opposition. Are there plans to model this?
Thanks
BTW I’m talking about the full game. (bought it 2 days ago).

No plans at the moment, as the game is generally based around the process of running the country, the election part is just the icing on the cake :smiley: We also only model two political parties right now, whereas obviously the real world situation is dramatically different in that respect.

Heh, I wouldn’t call it dramatically different, though I understand there are more real parties in Britain than in the United States. (Though I am a dues-paying card-carrying Libertarian…)

yes thats true. We do have a third party here, and some smaller irrelevant ones. I’m not sure what the situation is like in the rest of europe, they tend to have coalitions, and proportional representation.

There are quite a few different ones in Belgium. The difference between the two regions and the difference in the two regions demand at the very least for four parties to form a coalition. And they never will (nobody likes Vlaams Belang except for themselves for example). So it’s more likely to have a coalition of five or six parties.

Here, in France, there’s a lot more than two parties.
I’ll do a quick list:
UMP : the right wing party, Chirac is a member of this one, has the actual majority in the Assemblée Nationale.
PS : the left wing party, socialist. Mitterand was a member of this one.
FN : a nationalist party, negationist and racist, but a real political force in France (was on the second turn of the 2002 presidential elections)
UDF : a centrist party
Les Verts : ecologist party
PC : communist party, had a great influence but does no more…
LCR : a left extremist party (LCR = Revolutionary Communist League), altermondialist

There’s some other parties but I think I’ve mentioned the most importants, French political life is very lively :slight_smile:

Chirac… Right wing!?! You’re kidding?!?

not when compared to National Front :wink: , but in general he’s definatly a conservative. It’s relative too, eg New Labour in Britain not exactly the working mans best friend?

Let me put it this way.

US Democrats… Left wing!?! You’re kidding, right?!?

And so relativism is born.

voting is compulsory in Australia, although some people do abstain and get fined :frowning:

the electoral process is a bit complicated because you vote for multiple canditates for the same seat.

For example, say there are five parties contesting your electorate, you vote for them in order of your preferences eg

  1. Liberal Party
  2. National Party
  3. Democrats
  4. Greens
  5. Australian Labor Party

If the party you choose first does not win, your vote is transferred to the second party and so on until one party has a majority. This gets more complicated in the senate, as each state votes as one electorate, with seats being allocated to the states on a proportional basis, and there may be many minor parties contesting for a seat (in one election there were 250+ parties to choose from)

It does help prevent the vote from being split between similar parties, as I think happens in US Presidential Elections?
—Edit—
There is a better explanation here en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian … ral_system

Also note the Liberal Party is actually a conservative party, although it has more in common with New Labour than the US Republicans (Tony Blair and John Howard are good friends)

I like transferrable vote systems myself. One of the reasosn people in the UK defend our system is you have a directly elected ‘local’ MP. However, this can be a bad thing, because the whole ‘system’ implies you are spoken for by him, you must take issues to him, and nobody else. So if your local MP disagrees with you entirely on an issue, you are basically ignored on it, which is mad.

totally!

my wish would be for legislation by computer, but then we’d lose the spectacle of Question Time in the House :laughing: