I. Government Model Introduction

This model tries to simulate the political games within the government of your civ. What makes it interesting and challenging is the fact that people won't stare passively at you while ruling the empire and they won't just react to your decisions, but will be able to take decisions of their own and change things at the government if they have the power to do so. In very despotic regimes the game will give you only people's reactions, from protests to revolutions, which is covered in the Riots Model. People reacting to your rule is by itself a more sophisticated element compared to what we're used to in games like this, giving you a more defying game, even in despotic regimes. But if your civ happens to move to other forms of governments, through violent events or peacefully, you'll have to share power with others. The masses if it's a sort of democracy, or the military maybe, or the church if a fundamentalist regime arises. Now people won't just react, they'll act. And they'll actually use their power to make whatever they think is best for the civ. Under these circumstances, having only a share of total power and having less control of the civ's future, the civ might take paths you didn't expected. Will this be for better or for worse? Will you accept sharing power with others or will you just impose your will at all cost? 

II. Model Overview

There'll be a list of government policies (or government laws, if you prefer) affecting the civ in several ways. What is needed is to set the values for each policy. Changing policies you change the civ's behavior. The player knows what he wants for each policy, but it's those with political power the ones deciding what values policies will take. The player will always have some political power, but it can be low, high or even absolute. In fact the share of total power he has and how much other political entities have is also a matter of discussion.

Society is divided in classes. The aristocracy, the military, etc. Classes and the ruler will have to interact to define how much political power each should have and what values policies should take. To achieve this, the game will give an interface to the player where he'll be able to put in the values he thinks are best. On the other side, the model simulates what people in classes think, mostly given by the culture they posses, and through this, what they want for policies values and political power distribution. The link with culture (social model) makes people inclined to certain forms of government and opposed to others, giving the game a more stable and true-to-life look, with no arbitrary or ridiculous government shifts. Also, as culture slowly changes overtime, people can change their minds, so if they felt alright with a monarchy in the past, it might not be the case now.

The player is expected to move wisely when interacting with classes, choosing government styles not too disturbing for classes, controlling how much political power he has, how much others have, specially those with opposite ideas, and even dealing with corruption. Under a more questionable strategy, the player will be able to use Special Actions, like bribing politicians, killing adversaries, closing the parliament, etc.

Two definitions are needed before continuing, only to be precise about what we're talking about:

Government: All persons who take part in defining policies. It can be the great priest and the great military leader in a small tribe or the whole senate plus the elected administration in a modern democracy.

Political power: The power or capability to influence the final value of government policies. Any form of influence is counted in, legal or not. In a modern democracy, any party with at least one senator in the senate has political power, for example (very small in this case, though).

After reading the model you can see it working (at least most of its features) downloading this MS-EXCEL Workbook (click to download). 

III. General Definitions

III.1 Govt. Policies

The following are the policies the govt. must decide on. They'll be explained and understood better later. This is list is not supposed to be complete. It contains what is felt as the minimum set of policies. According to other models' needs, the list can be enlarged. 

-Tax Rate (0-100%): Tax is imposed on privates. Individuals, landowners, company owners and so on. In a pure communist regime, tax rate is irrelevant since no private sector exists. 

-Civil Rights (CR): (0-100) The greater the number, the more liberties the people has concerning lifestyle, freedom of speech, etc... 

-Religion Discrimination (RD): (0-5) This variable describes the relationship between government and religion. If RD=0 the State is secular. If 1<=RD<=5, there's an official religion and people practicing other beliefs are considered minorities. The type of treatment toward other beliefs becomes more intolerant the higher RD is. 

-Ethnic Discrimination (ED): (0-10) This variable defines if there's or not an ethnic group above the rest and if so, what kind of treatment other ethnic groups get. If ED=0, all ethnic groups are considered equal and the civ is said to be "multiethnic". If 1<=ED<=10, there's a preferred ethnic group (FE, Romans in roman empire) and all the rest are considered minorities (this is the most common case). The type of treatment other ethnic groups get is more disrespectful the higher ED is. 

-Slavery (SL): (0-2) Defines if minorities can be slavered or not. 0=Slavery is not allowed, 1=It is allowed in its most common form. This means some people in minorities is slavered with some laws regulating it like the possibility to buy freedom. If SL=2 it is the same as in SL=1, but some specific ethnic groups can be totally slavered in a more brutal way, like it was with Africans. For now and until a better procedure is developed, it'll be the ruler's decision which exact tribes can be slavered this way when SL=2. 

-Private Property (PP): (0%-100%) Defines what share of total economic activities lie in the hands of the private sector. The rest is owned by the State or the king himself (for ancient regimes). 

-Economic Planning (EP): (0%-100%) Defines how much control government has over economy, both private and public sector. It includes things like prices setting, limits on production, etc. 

-Social Policies (SP): (0%-100%) This will define how much of a welfare state the civ has. It will include all redistribution practices, social security, healthcare, free education, etc. 

-Foreign Affairs (FA): (0-100) Defines the level of aggressiveness the ruler is allowed to be in the international arena. 0 means passive/peaceful and 100 means world conquest.

The ruler/player will want a specific value for each of these policies. The ruler's preferences will be called "Ruler's Government Profile". The real set of values the civ has is called "Government Profile". 

III.2 Majorities and Minorities

The empire can hold several ethnic groups, as described in the social model. Normally only one of them is considered the "civ's people" like Romans in the roman empire. In this case Romans are said to be the majorities population (not necessarily being majority in terms of demography) and all other ethnic groups are said to be minorities. In some cases, though, the government might do no discrimination at all. In this case all ethnic groups are considered within majorities. People supporting non-official religions are also considered minorities.

For all what follows minorities are irrelevant. That's because this model simulates the political game in the government leading to set the values for each government policy and minorities are definitely out of the government and have no political power to play this game. The political game minorities play is only at the level of protests and rebellions trying to stop being a minority or at least have a better treatment from majorities. That's covered in the Riots Model.

As will be shown, people in majorities will be able to participate in the government depending on the regime. When they participate, they do it deeply influenced by their culture. The government model stores cultural information of majorities from the social model in the Majorities Cultural Attributes (MCA). See Appendix 2 for more details on how info is transformed from the social model to MCA. 

III.3 Classes

Majorities population (not religiously or ethnically discriminated peoples) are divided in classes: 

The Upper Class (UC): The aristocracy. The people who owns the means of production. Landowners, company owners, capitalists, nobility, etc.

The Lower Class (LC): The common people. Workers, professionals, peasants, proletarians, etc.

The Religious Class (RC): High priests in command of the Church. If there is an official religion, RC represents the clergy of this religion. If there's no official religion (a secular State), the class contains all high priests from all present religions in equal conditions.

The Military Class (MC): High officers of the army. NOT the whole army. The common soldier belongs to the LC.

The Bureaucratic Elite (BE): Government employees in key positions in the bureaucratic apparatus. They control most of the government's administration and live an accommodated life. It's a wealthy class. The USSR had a powerful BE and no Upper Class, for example. 

Each class has its own mentality (idea of how the government should look like). UC and LC are deeply influenced by culture and have some differences about how economy should work. The religious class is mostly guided by its doctrine (taken from the social model) and shares some ideas with normal people. Appendix 2 shows how the info from the social model is transformed to create RCM (Religious Class Mentality). The BE always wants to preserve the current form of government, since its welfare comes from the particular way the government is currently working. As for MC, the mentality high officers in the army have is given by their origin. They can come from the LC or the UC. If they come from the LC, then are LC minded and the same for UC. In general, they come partly from the UC and partly from LC. Also, the ruler has an influence over MC mentality through "choosing the right men". The level at which each of these three factors influences MC mentality is explained later. 

III.4 Political Structure & Hidden Policies

The distribution of political power among classes and the ruler is called the political structure. For example, a Political Structure might look like this:

The main role of the Political Structure is saying how much power each entity has. But, at the same time, some policies are "hidden" in the political structure. These "hidden policies" are: 

-Privileges: If the relative political power held by the UC (relative to LC political power) is greater than its relative demographic share (relative to LC demographic share), it'll be understood as UC having special privileges over the LC. These are privileges given to the UC by law like those nobility had in middle ages. The magnitude of privileges will affect income distribution and influence over the military. Privileges are computed as: 

-Influence over the Military Class: As said before, the political structure partly defines what type of mentality MC has. Ruler's political power and privileges are used to determine MC preferences, like this:

MC share with Ruler's mentality (MC_R): Exp(-0.03*(110-Ruler_polpower*100))

MC share with UC mentality (MC_U): (1-MC_R)*(0.5+0.5*Privileges)

MC share with LC mentality (MC_L): 1-MC_R-MC_U

The term "hidden policies" does not mean people don't realize about these effects. It means we don't need a special policy like "UC Privileges" explicitly, and we can build the privileges effect from info in the Political Structure. 

III.5 Political Power: Law and influences

The distribution of power among classes and the ruler (Political Structure) is built using two sets of values. The first is the "nominal" Political Structure. It's the political power given to each entity "by law". The second is the "de facto influence" each entity has. If the ruler uses bribes on "politicians" of other classes, FE, he has more power than his nominal value. Each class has its own level of de facto influence and a method to compute real political power, as will be described later in section IV.1. 

III.6 Some Civ-Level Important Variables

-Dominant Religion (DR): The religion with most followers within majorities. 

-Empire's Stability (ES): (0-10) This is a measure of how stable the empire is seen by the people. Events decrease ES, like losing a province, having a riot or if the ruler is being replaced by force. Every game turn ES is increased a bit, so if these events don't happen often, the feeling goes continuously upwards. 

-Income Distribution (ID): How many times UC per capita income is greater than LC per capita income: UC_PCI/LC_PCI, where UC_PCI and LC_PCI come from the economic model. 

III.7 Ideologies

An ideology is a coherent set of values for the political structure and some of the government policies. The government policies included in ideologies are:

-Economic Planning
-Social Policies
-Private Property

So, an ideology is a view about how the government should be regarding 1)who has the power (nominal political structure); 2)economy; and 3)privileges and the composition of high military command (hidden policies). This is what an ideology may look like: 

People will choose the ideology best fitting their desires and will use any political power they posses to try to impose that view in the govt. The game will have a pool of ideologies representing the most common forms of government seen in history and some more, like this:

Ancient Despotism (warlord rule), Divine Monarchy, Monarchy, Constitutional Monarchy, Oligarchy, Republic, Capitalist Democracy, Democratic Communism, Social Democracy, Fundamentalism, Communist Dictatorship and Capitalist Dictatorship. 

III.8 Types of Policies

There are 3 types of policies:

1) Ruler's Exclusive Policies: Policies the ruler/player can decide alone about. For now, only the tax rate is in this category. This category exist only because of the difficulty in finding a reasonable way to simulate what people want for them.

2) Ideologically Negotiated Policies (INP): Policies the ruler negotiates with the rest classes and where classes define what they want based on ideologies. They are:

-Hidden Policies/Political Structure
-Economic Planning
-Social Policies
-Private Property

3) Directly Negotiated Policies (DNP): Policies the ruler/player must negotiate with classes, where classes define what they want directly for each policy as opposed to choosing an ideology and from it a value for the policy. They are:

-Slavery
-Ethnic Discrimination
-Religious Discrimination
-Civil Rights
-Foreign Policies