Regarding Elections for Leadership positions

[js29095]

This is probably gonna be a little wordy, but here is how I'd see this working.

The House of Representatives

Speaker of the House

The Speaker of the House is nominated by both parties, and voted on by the House at large. Instead of having it currently where the most political points assures the Speakership, there should be an option to allow members to nominate someone via a bill, and that bill will be sent to vote and if it passes then that person becomes Speaker of the House.

House Leaders and Whips

Currently, the system in use is alright, however a vote between the chairs of the caucuses for each party voting between the Democrats and Republicans separately is a good way to vote in a new House Leader(Majority and Minority), and the whip is chosen by the leader.

The Senate

The longest serving member of the Majority Party is the President pro tempore of the Senate, a position that should be added in, honestly. The election process for the Senate Leaders and whips should be decided between the parties(similar to the House leadership election above) and the whips should be appointed.

[IF(lazy, allthetime, sometimes)]

These are all good suggestions. I think the political points system is pretty simplistic right now. All I have to do to become a speaker is to be a chairman for a few years and then win a congressional race. That doesn't really happen in real life.

[Verlumino]

I fully agree about changing how the leadership positions are determined. I was thinking that the game would probably randomly select several high level politicians to run for the position, and then all of the politicians could vote for the candidate they liked most (based on several similarity metrics such as caucus and policy agreement - as well as experience).

The player would also be allowed to join the process to try to win a leadership position. Even better would be if there was some sort of gameplay element where the player could try to convince other politicians to support him/her for the leadership position, but that would probably have to come later.

[Somberg]

Originally posted by Verlumino:

I fully agree about changing how the leadership positions are determined. I was thinking that the game would probably randomly select several high level politicians to run for the position, and then all of the politicians could vote for the candidate they liked most (based on several similarity metrics such as caucus and policy agreement - as well as experience).

The player would also be allowed to join the process to try to win a leadership position. Even better would be if there was some sort of gameplay element where the player could try to convince other politicians to support him/her for the leadership position, but that would probably have to come later.

So would this be an internal thing within each party to determine who is nominated for a leadership position? Probably most relevant for Speaker of the House since this is a constitutional position and is voted on by the entire House (the others aren't) but each party has internal elections within their caucus to determine who they would put forward as the nominee for Speaker.There is obviously room for dissension from members who are particularly against whoever the party decides to nominate (the criteria for this depends on how leadership elections are modeled) but the House vote is usually a foregone conclusion.

For Speaker elections as well the Majority Leader (if the current Speaker retired) or the Minority Leader (if a party won control of the House in the last election) usually ends up running and being nominated by the party for the Speakership but not always as there is of course an internal caucus election that takes place beforehand. However should probably always have them running as the default and have them be favored to win as this also incentivizes players to move up the leadership chain if they want to become Speaker and is a more realistic way of doing things.