How the hell does this work?

[Tatiacus]

I'm playing as Prussia and every political party I don't want to gain power is gaining power. I know the only way to effectively change that is election events but the surge in Anarchist Liberals, Liberals, Socialists and Communist is so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ huge they still get enormous amounts more spots in the Upper House and it is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ annoying and I can't do reforms. How the hell do I do anything in Politics? And on the rare occasion where I can do a reform the election literally gives them back all of their power even when I make the best decisions in events and reforms they still all grow by 15% every time there is an election and reforms don't really do much in the first place. Is there something I'm doing wrong and what can I do?

[BreadandYeast]

Use party loyalty focus on high pop voter states, doesn't change pops ideology but makes them more likely to pick that certain party during elections.

[Lembley42]

Originally posted by Bread:

Use party loyalty focus on high pop voter states, doesn't change pops ideology but makes them more likely to pick that certain party during elections.

Definetly do not use party loyality focus. National Focus is very strong in some ways, but very weak in this Focus points. 0.001% change per day means 0.365% for an entire year - in just one region. It also does not stop voters of "changing back".


Back to the question:
You generally can pass reforms with a high enough militancy and consciousness. This means oddly, that "pissing your people off" is a good thing, as it allows you to pass critical reforms like Healthcare more quickly. Some player abuse this by intentionally leaving the country open for occupation by an enemy. There are many other ways to deliberately piss people off (like switching governments alot) but it's pretty gamey.

If you want to do Reform X, but your people want to do Reform Y, just pass X. Your people still will want Reform Y, so once the cooldown expires, you can just pass it again.

"Reforms dont really do much" - in Vanilla, Social Reforms like Healthcare are borderline broken. +0.08% Population sounds like nothing, until you realize the base growth is +0.04%. For no cost but clicking it you triple the base pop growth.

About Liberals, Socialists, etc.: This is generally a "flow of the game". Early on Liberal grows stronger, but with a larger and larger industrial base, Socialist tend to become more powerful (as Factory workers are more likely to be Socialist). Since you're a Monarchy, you can ignore this as far as Policy goes.
For Reforms, like I pointed out, Militancy+Consciousness is the biggest thing.

As pushing through a reform lowers militancy, this can become useful to nations like United Kingdom, who usually build up alot of Militancy in India (with potential for mass revolts). By using reforms sparsingly to burn off militancy when needed, you can avoid any rebellions all game.

If you want to really push through reforms, deliberately losing to Communist rebels is also a way, since their 'elections' always yield 100% of the votes to the Communist party, which is in favor of every reform. Fascism works similiarly, only that Fascism also allows to take reforms back freely.