Karrde's Analysis of the Congress Changes

Day 1,765, 12:43 Published in United Kingdom United Kingdom by Talon Karrde


My Friends,

As you may be aware, the admins are introducing some new rules for the upcoming congress elections, and all subsequent congress elections in the future. These rules can be found here if you want to read the original source material.

Basically, instead of voting for individual candidates in constituent regions, you simply vote for the party of your choice on the day of the election. This is quite a change to what has been an eRepublik constant for many years, and it remains to be seen just how big an impact this will have to the state of politics across the eWorld. In this article I’ll examine some of the implications, and make some predictions about the election here in the UK.







So, a glance at the wiki page tells us that, essentially, our new system of democracy is proportional representation. In PR, seats are awarded to all parties proportionately to the number of votes they receive. This is different to our previous system of first past the post, and could well prove to be a boon for smaller parties in that they will often be guaranteed at least one seat and thus voice in their countries’ congress. On the other hand, if some parties are substantially bigger than others and attract significantly more votes, this could lead to some parties dominating their country.

This also makes life difficult for parties outside the top 5 to get any voice at all. In previous months, I’ve noticed some parties run their members under the banner of a larger party, due to space being available in some regions. The dynamic of this has now been changed; with party leaders able to rank their candidates, it will be a difficult choice for them to include outside candidates, potentially excluding their own.

We can also take some lessons from real life when looking at PR. A famous example of PR failing spectacularly was in Weimar Germany, in which PR led to increasingly fractured governments built upon fractured parliaments; eventually contributing to the rise of the Nazi party. Thankfully, there is not risk of a similar occurrence in eRepublik, as governments are not built based on having a majority in congress, but rather on who is elected to be Country President. The fact that so much of that map is shaded in some way is a good indicator that there are plenty of successful implementations of PR.







This map shows all countries in the real world that use PR in some form. As you can see, there are many variants of this system of voting, but all the countries shaded in green use exactly the same system that we now have in eRepublik; namely the party list. Under this system, you vote for your preferred party, then the leadership of that party picks the (in theory!) best and brightest from their ranks to take up the seats granted to them. I suspect there will be a decent amount of this going on in eRepublik, along with promoting new players and encouraging them to get involved with politics; counterbalanced by the old politicians getting safe seats every time too. Under this system it is possible to have ‘safe’ seats, whereby some players are guaranteed a congress seat and medal, simply due to the number of votes each party attracts.


There are also some pretty big implications for ‘PTOs,’ an oft used acronym meaning ‘Political Take Overs,’ in which external or hostile forces gain control of congress seats in order to manipulate events, accept citizenships from more enemies, and eventually gain enough votes to take over the country entirely. As a concept it rarely works outside of the smallest of countries, as the leadership of anything bigger will normally organise their resources to defeat all but the most insidious of PTOs.


This change does mean, though, that rogue candidates cannot simply attach themselves to a party and hope to be on the ballot; Party Presidents now have much more control over who will get elected from their party. The only trouble will come when PTOers control one or more of the top 5 parties in a country.







If, then, a top-5 party falls to PTOers, they are virtually guaranteed congress seats. They can then use these to accept more citizens into the country and snowball the problem. Month to month the problem would then increase until a tipping point is reached, and the PTOers can exert their influence. A good example of this already happening is in the USA just now, where a lot of their citizenry were originally accepted in from allied countries to take advantage of bonuses or for political reasons, but have since garnered colder relations with the hierarchy and government. They and other groups in America have the votes to potentially cause serious problems, made much worse by this game change.




What could this mean in terms of seats?

During the last congress election in the UK, the following seats were gaine😛

The Unity Party: 12
The UKPP: 10
Every Single One: 11
PCP: 3
UKRP: 3


Since then, the PCP have been replaced in the top 5 by New Era, but since they have a similarly sized member base we’ll treat them the same statistically.

Under PR, and based on the number of votes in both the last congress and PP elections, we’d expect the following number of seats to be awarde😛






So that’s
TUP +1
UKPP no change
ESO -2
NE +1
UKRP +1


So it shouldn’t change the outlook a great deal. In reality this change will just make it harder for individuals out of favour with the party to get in, as well as discouraging rogue candidates who will be unlikely to be elected. Comparing this to the risk of losing control of one or more top 5 parties, I’d say for most countries this is a positive change.

Of course the jury is still out on that, and while I find that statistics often prove to ring true, any number of things could happen in the runup to the elections. And of course, we simply can't discount bugs or issues preventing things from working quite as we expect them to!


Thanks for reading,

Talon Karrde