WORLDBUILDING GOVERNMENTS AND POLITICS - Terrible Writing Advice

Don’t let democracy die with thunderous applause because TWA is here to teach writers how to build their own governments for their worlds! From monarchies to democracies, learn how to design a government that works for you because it probably won’t work for the people it governs, but that’s their problem.

TIMESTAMPS
00:00 Introduction
00:46 Setting serves the story
01:55 Monarchy
04:01 Republic
5:34 Democracy
09:21 Corporatocracy
10:06 Oligarchy
11:08 Fascism
12:07 Theocracy
13:27 Anarchy
13:45 Three Functions of Government
15:12 Power and influence of states
16:31 JP complains about Realism in international relations
16:56 States and war
18:28 Remember that people are still people
19:34 Leaders spend a good chunk of their time justifying their power
20:05 Dystopias are not exempt from the normal rules of politics
20:47 Building nations on the fly
21:49 When writing about a real world government, research it
22:04 Conclusion
23:13 Sponsorship Wars - Greed's Meeting or Greedting if you will

SOCIAL MEDIA LINKS

CREDITS
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License

[DShakey]

If you play enough hoi4, you will eventually develop a sixth sense to tell when a fictional government was designed by someone who plays hoi4.

[sdagoth]

I'm willing to cut writers some slack on this topic, we aren't even able to construct decent governments in the real world.

[newdawngamingchannel]

Hoi4 politics:
“i wanna form austria hungry” - world conquest
“I wanna form buzantium” - world conquest
“I want that one province over my boarder” - world conquest

[williamtehan]

The right way to write politics in story is to make your least favourite politician the villain

[javonyounger]

Just make entire governments defined by one or two key traits that also line up with the hats- I mean the culture of their people.

[downix]

The phrase "Mussolini made the trains run on time" was ironic. His solution to the trains was to eliminate the schedules entirely. No schedule, cant be late!

[Ramschat]

As a small note from a history student: The Seven Kingdoms from ASOIAF is really a feudal monarchy, not an absolutist one. The difference being that local/regional lords have a lot of autonomy and rights that the King must respect to stay in power.

[hubertk]

Features: peaceful transition of power
Historical examples: The Roman Republic

[reisen]

Kudos to JP for recognizing that a majority of Americans have no idea how thier own government works.

[cloudydays]

Government: "Being dead is no excuse for not paying your taxes."

[jacoporegini]

As a political scientist who likes to read, boy do most writers know NOTHING about government and politics. Good thing JP is here to fix that.

[ceinwenchandler]

I love how one of the things you listed as an issue with democracy was "a conversation with the average voter." So true.

[etharchildres]

I was so confused about politics, but really it’s simple.
Person A wants.
Person B wants.
Person A wants want more.
Person B tries to get person C to want wants more than Person A.
Person B maybe wins.
Person A still wants want.

REPEAT.

[CharliMorganMusic]

You missed something when discussing Soft Power:
- K-pop is soft power.
- Anime is soft power.
- Thai restaurants are soft power.

[tereziamarkova]

A little note on the absolute monarchy - a common misconception is that this was the system in place throughout the feudal era. It was not, and in fact absolutism was a step AWAY from feudalism. In feudalism, the landholding class (nobility, but also church or city councils) held quite a bit of power, in some cases to the point of making the king a mere figurehead. In the late middle ages, this power was gradually stripped away from the landholding class, as the kings consolidated power in their own hands. In many countries, this was accompanied by a creation of robust state bureucracy, professional army etc - a lot of the things that differentiate a medieval government from a modern one. There was even an idea floating around that kings should use this newly attained power for the good of the people, the so-called "enlightened absolutism". Of course, in practice, king being only as enlightened as he well damn pleased was understandably not enough for most people and situations, hence the National Assembly, and the resulting French Revolution. TL;DR Though, say, Richard the Lionheart and Elizabeth I were both monarchs and shared some similarities (for example, the "divine right of kings"), the ways they used and drawn power were vastly different.

[ruggiebuggie]

Y’know, some people get home from work, look at the news, then curl up with a fantasy book that is exactly just the world they already live in except everyone wears leather bracers.

[xcyan_lilyx]

Fantasy and isekai have to make it an idealized monarchy, no exceptions

[VoltismProductions]

for actual anarchy, see: spanish civil war, post ww1 ukraine

also: war is politics by other means, and politics is war by other means. I think that is helpful to keep in mind

[ThePoliticrat]

Republics can also be empires. “Empire” is a purely geopolitical designation. “Republic” has to do with the internal political structure.

[connorwalters]

My favorite example of world building politics comes from the TTRPG Lancer. In Lancer, the galaxy is run by a federation called Union. This Union is so decentralized that it doesn’t even have an executive branch, instead only having a legislative branch (CentComm) and a judicial branch (the Department of Justice and Human Rights).

The reason Union is so decentralized is for both practical and moral reason. As far as practical reasons, Union exists on such a massive scale that it simply would not be practical for the government to have a presence on every single world. Instead, Union delegates to local leaders on individual planets, moons, stations, etc. while the Union itself is mostly concerned with maintaining galactic infrastructure and occasionally intervening if one of the local leaders gets a little dictator-y.

As for the moral reasons, the Union used to be ruled by a space fascist “Anthrochauvinist” party which was highly centralized, oppressive, militarized, and by the end outright genocidal. The new government lives with the fear that if they use their power too much, they will relapse and destroy the fragile democracy they have built.

However, this means the Union ends up severely over correcting and letting several of its constituent systems get away with a lot of fucked up stuff because they’re scared of the political backlash that will come with militarily intervening.

I like Lancer’s take on government and politics because it shows how, once you reach a large enough scale, concepts like nation states and even the very notion of centralized government start to break down, in favor of a loose federation whose job is to keep the lights on and leave everyone else to their business