this is the situation:
recently it was changed that a nation that hits the required population immediately gets the corresponding issue.
i have some old nations with more then 1 billion population. --> they qualify for the special issues to unlock the Leader, Capital and Religion-fields.
they were all on vacation mode with 5 waiting issues since long before those special issues were added to the game.
recently i set vacation mode to 'off' in those puppets and started answering some issues.
as soon as an update passed while the puppets had free issue-slots, the religion issue popped up as intended with the recent change, but the leader and capital issues did not come automatically, also not during the next update while again having free issue-slots
i don't care to wait for them to pop up at random, but maybe it was not intended to work this way. so i just let you know.