Miscellaneous points

[wellsoberlin]

One person told me that their attempt to run a Parlement game was
stymied by the failure to form a Government. One thing I hope will
come out of this group is experimentation with rules to solve problems
like that. I seem to remember having a rule in postal games that in
the absence of a Government formed voluntarily by players you had just
a budget vote and an election. This happens in European legislatures
-- they have what are called "caretaker governments". But I can't
find any file mentioning that rule. (It is analogous to no-trumps in
bridge.)

It was also suggested that most Americans are not familiar with
parliamentary style legislatures which have many parties and form
Governments by coalition instead of electing the President separately
the way we do in the USA. (Note: Such countries often do elect
someone called a president but the president is a figurehead, as in
Italy or German -- but not these days in France.) Nor are they
familiar with the political situation in Europe in the 1920's, when
most parliaments had large undemocratic extremist parts on the left
and right and a muddle of democratic parties divided by class,
religion, ethnic group and other issues in the middle.

Well, it would be reasonably to provide more American-like scenarios.
I hope people design lots of scenarios. Two possibilities:

1) A USA run as a parliamentary democracy and coalition governments.
The parties could be, for example, Labor, Freen, Liberal, Libertarian,
Business-Oriented Conservative, Social Conservative, and others. You
could have blocs such as union, environmentalist, businessmen,
suburbanites (soccer moms), religious right, libertarian westerners,
and so on.

I would suggest having 50 or so representative districts instead of
trying handle 435 districts, which would bog down the game even with a
computer. You could have districts called for example Atlanta,
Brooklyn, rural southern Alabama, Denver, rural Michigan, suburban
Detroit, suburban Dallas, and so on, with bloc distributions that are
roughly like the real places. But only around 50 of them.

2) You could have a congress as in (1) but with an elected president
and no coalition governments. What would constitute winning in this
case? Think about it

Charles Wells