What do your people think about you, as their leader? Do they agree with your policies, or are they perhaps finding that banning smartphones is a bit a silly idea? NationStates is a political simulator that deals with many questions regarding your popularity, from encouraging you to embark on silly gimmicks to raise the polls, to having to handle tricky coalition alliances in parliament because your party wasn't able to capture a majority, to wandering if your dictatorship can kill a few more dissidents to secure power.
However, it suffers a fundamental problem when it comes to looking at this: mechanically, the player cannot lose control of their nation. After all, realistically being at war with 10 countries at once should see the player be removed in violent battle culminating in a foreign power's flag flying over the capital's tallest building; we can't put this in though because it would be game over. Internally, we have this problem too: if the leader actually lost an election in a landslide vote under the banner of re-legalising cars, then that too would obviously be game over.
So what can be done?
Obviously you must have guessed what this new stat idea is: the consensus.
Here's the assumption: imagine there is a roughly 35% bloc of the population that will always support the leader no matter how absurdly crazy their politics actually are. 35% is an assumption based on how certain rulers are able to get elected on or around that number: in 2015, the Conservatives in the UK were able to get a majority of parliament seats for winning on 37% of the vote, to name just one example, and I think it's a fairly reasonable percentage to be able to maintain a leader in any country, assuming the rest of the population is sufficiently apathetic, disorganised, divided or powerlessly slaving away in the mines. Obviously it's not a hard and fast number, but it's just as an illustration.
But what about that rest of the population? How well do they get along with the leader's core supporters? The answer will of course vary; in a prosperous nation with a good, even-handed ruler, much of that group will agree that they are living under a system that is marvellous and fair. In other cases, they will be gagging to tear out someone's throat in seething anger. This degree of feeling and interaction, is what the game should be measuring.
So, how would you calculate this, Chan?
Here's my base idea:
The raw simple number is the same as the cheerfulness stat- after all, if people are happy then they will also agree with their neighbours that life is good. This figure will then have the political freedom stat controlled onto it. I was thinking this could be done is some kind of formula, like having a +2% increase in the consensus stat for every 5 political freedom points added. This is based on the idea that, the politics of the nation would more and more reflect whether this was the wishes of the people or not. The less freedom, the more likely we are to see a dictator rampaging around without fear or favour doing whatever they damn well please. An inverse relationship will then be pegged to the ideological radicality stat. Since we assume the higher that number gets, the more removed we are from what the mainstream might be asking for, we can then track an inverse relationship with the modified stat afterwards, perhaps say a -5 for every 20 points added to radicality.
This is just an idea knocking around as to how the stat could be measured to begin with, but I'd expect it to evolve (either now or in the backstage) into much more it's own thing, or at least into something controlled by other factors.
But what do you think? Yay, nay, crazy or good idea with a wrong approach on how to measure it? I now leave the floor open, and await to see what happens.
