Join the new world

Once again, congress elections draw near and eager hopefuls and hardy veterans alike hope to be selected to be one of those who have a hand in democratically guiding the country, whether be it through foreign economic decisions, internal taxation policy or of course, war. As it stands, there are 33 members of the eJapanese congress, originally comprising of members of the 5 largest parties from the last set of elections which took place pre-v1.   

With the current president, King Waseem, now preparing to step down in favour of new blood, there has been much movement of members between parties so that the ULJ had regenerated its ranks significantly by the time of the last elections, and a new party, the TFC, had emerged comprising of a few senior and experienced eRepublikers, including the soon to be e😜resident Waseem. However, what does it really mean to be part of congress?

Congress has the ability to pass changes on a national level through such devices as taxes and foreign economic/defence partnerships. As such, they provide the overarching framework through which ordinary eJapanese citizens may conduct their lives; eg. the amount of taxes imposed on their food purchases or their minimum wage, which would ideally allow any employed citizen to manage to at least buy one unit of food for each day they work. They are like the theatre backstage crew who set the props ready for the actors, the ordinary citizens, to play their role on the stage of eRepublik.

Thus, the overall success of eJapan depends very much on the general populace as well as the Executive. Congress may set the guidelines, but it is the people who must work under them to build a strong eJapan. This includes both the shrewd businessman seeking riches and the humble worker who drives the industry forward; both the media moguls who bring news to the attention of all and those readers who reply to and sustain debate. Above all, what is needed is a healthily active and large population where citizens contribute in one form or another. Statistics show quite clearly that the general strength of a country correlates very strongly to the active population, as every citizen has roughly the same potential to help their country whether in trade or war. Unfortunately, we ourselves have a rather small population compared to many other nations and as such, an active population is even more important to us. Although small in number, if we can get a large majority of our population active, we would be able to have the economic and military might of a nation nominally larger than ourselves. So what does all this talk about the general population have to do with our politics? Just this: the government themselves are in every way the same as the ordinary worker or manager, but for the fact that they can vote for or create proposals. Every member of government, whether just a member of congress or the president, is also a worker or manager in some industry! They are not a special class of people separate from the ordinary man; they are after all, elected from the ordinary people. And similarly, they can be just as inactive as the general citizen; which would mean that despite their high position, they might as well not exist.

From some data (http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pT_3UDvO0hC9CyJ_U3uBXJA&gid=0) based on statistics available just before v1 (and so it is not exactly up to date but is still relevant), you can see that in the last set of elections, a large majority of the official population was absent (note that the population then included SO's and still does to an extent). Those who were members of a political party comprised less than 70% of the entire population and of this same number of party members, only half of them turned out to vote (roughly a third of the population). This was found to be slightly higher than the number of "active" party members (estimated to be the number of people who took part in the last internal party elections).

As a result, we can see that the number alone is no sure indicator of a country's strength and by the same token, a political party's strength. It is the actual active citizens who make a difference! As such, even though the biggest and "strongest" party the JUP (formerly NPJ) has a larger membership than the ULJ, they are arguably weaker, as they have a lesser number of active members. Indeed, the ULJ are the only party which was shown to have a majority of members active (roughly 60% compared to 30% of the JUP) followed by the JLP who almost had a majority of members active at about 45%. Thus, the most powerful party could in fact be the ULJ! That is, if these same active members are elevated to congress. On average, over the last 4 proposals, only 20 members of the 33 member strong congress were present (this however could be in part due to the proposals lasting only 24hrs).

Ultimately, what eJapan needs most of all is a larger active population, and the best way [in my opinion] to obtain this would be to try to target already active citizens of other countries. This would not only strengthen ourselves but weaken our competitors. This is as in real life, where is is far easier, statistically speaking, to target voters who support opposing parties than to recruit non-voters who are politically inactive.

The only question is how eJapan can be advertised as the better place to be.



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Laurana Psion