Join the new world

By the end of today, we will have our first elected v1 congress, who will lead our nation on for the upcoming month. With the new fangled voting system, voters will pick and choose their favourite candidate for congress, rather than their preferred party. As such, this is a chance for voters to really pick the best candidate for the job, regardless of party membership. As such, there could be various outcomes. On the one hand, a small party could easily gain a high representation in congress if they have members who are very popular with the voters. On the other hand, a large party could forcefully dominate congress, by forcing its horde of members to vote selectively, effectively forcing out competition.

Thus, we can see that being a congressman has shifted from being a more party orientated selection and more towards an open democratic mandate on an individual level. As such, I ask everyone to please vote wisely for whoever YOU believe is the best candidate for the job, rather than blindly voting along with general consensus. If you believe there is a better candidate outside of your party, feel free to vote for them on the basis of merit. We need the best minds we have in congress.

However, what troubles me is that our current political parties can be quite hard to distinguish from one another. Firstly, this is because parties are given only a very brief description (eg. Libertarian, Centre-right), and there are often multiple parties bearing the same description! Secondly, unlike real life, we have fewer issues for parties to take a stance on (eg. taxes, MPP, citizen fee). In fact, almost all issues are of economic origin! eRepublik as yet does not recognise any real social aspect in government and politics. Even the “minimum wage” is mainly for economic effect.

The political ideologies of the real world (eg. Social-Democracy, Fascism, Centrist) also appear to have different meaning here since they cannot be fully realised or carried out in the current in-game system. In fact, even the economic aspects would not be directly applicable to the eRepublik economy due to them being based on a vastly different standard. They often also bring across prejudices and misunderstandings from the real world. Perhaps we could slowly develop our own specific terminology over time? (eg. Zockyism)

Nevertheless, I believe that it would be better to embrace a more complete view of politics. This would make for better gameplay in general and also help to distinguish parties from one another (even if more non-economic aspects are not developed). More importantly, it would help distinguish “who” the individual congress candidates are!

As such, I invite you all (especially those who are politically active) to take a brief test that will help give a clearer picture of your political stance; it aims to provide a calculation of your political beliefs on both an economic and social axis. (It would ideally also have a third axis for better detail but I have not found an appropriate test. This is the closest but I would not recommend using it) It only really takes on meaning if many people take the test, so that we can see how different people compare with one another.

I would like to request that politically active people post their scores on the eJapan forum here (http://www.aoi-fan.uni.cc/index.php?showtopic=98), so that the public know where we stand.

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Laurana Psion