One procedure to rule them all
On procedural generation of forms of government for imaginary countries.
Every country has a form of government and at least some power structures, and any narration set in a specific country relies on some level of knowledge of what its institutions are, and what the people in power look like and think of themselves and of the rest of the population.
Especially if the plot involves people of authority, as it often is the case in the fantasy genre, these can become elements of primary importance for the story.
If the ruler has been assassinated we must know who may benefit from their death and who will mourn them. We may also need to know who will run the country while the situation is handled and who will be the new ruler (and how will it be selected, and when). Does their consort or offspring automatically ascend to power? Is there going to be an election?
Even if our plot doesn’t directly involve those figures, the distribution of power in a society defines many aspects of the society and deeply shapes the lives of citizens.
Conflicts of power
In this post I will explore a system to procedurally generate government types for the countries in my automatic narrative system. I don’t want my countries to be generic kingdoms, as that would make everything very flat. I want kingdoms, republics, empires, federations, anarchies and everything in between.
The first thing to notice about power is that, as a wise man once said, “everybody wants to rule the world”. Power is always contended. Even century-long, undisputed monarchies have to deal with the claims of religious groups with large followings, with the military chain of command, with the practical power of guilds and other social groups closer to the population. This, of course, without even considering external pressures like the intentions of powerful neighbours. We tend to have a static view of the medieval times, but in reality borders were continuously trespassed and the distribution of power was the ever-changing result of continuous negotiation backed by skirmishes and intimidation.
I want my system to produce forms of government that lead to interesting stories, with descriptions that range from “this is a republic with strong support from the higher levels of the population thanks to a strict caste system” to “this is technically a monarchy but the king is a merely formal figure with ceremonial purposes and all the power is administered by the charismatic leader of the army”, to even “the country is in a complete state of anarchy and only the powerful mafia can keep the population under control”.
My initial exploration of the “design space” of possible forms of government suggested a tiered approach based on acknowledging three different levels of power and on exploring the results of their mutual interactions. I’ve called the first two tiers “institutional powers” and the third one “de-facto powers”.
First-tier powers
First-tier powers are individuals that stay at the top of some sort of chain of command. They can be emperors, kings, popes or other religious leaders, generals or consuls. Their power comes from different possible sources, such as tradition, religious faith, charisma, democracy, money or strength. There can be many names and many sources of power, but they always wield what power they have at will, based on personal judgment and usually without any supervision. They must often split their power with other first- or second-tier powers, though. Widely known examples of this situation are the two consuls of the Roman Republic (where two figures were intended to check on each other) and situations where a secular leader and a religious leader guide different aspects of the national life.
Second-tier powers
Second-tier, or congressional, powers are assemblies of people that accompany or replace first-tier powers in their duties. These also go by many names, such as senates, parliaments, councils, committees. Responsibilities and powers of these groups vary and there can be one, two or more different types of congresses coexisting (situations respectively known as uni-, bi- or multi-cameralism). The source of their powers can be varied as well, as they can be expression of an underlying democracy or some kind of oligarchy or technocracy.
The existence of second-tier powers is sometimes a step forward in terms of plurality, and is usually a trait of more advanced nations.
Third-tier powers
Third-tier powers are those more closely related to the population or to sections thereof. They come in two flavours, based on whether they “cut” society horizontally or vertically.
Horizontal sections are those related to ethnicity, castes, wealth and less often culture (as in language and historical background), where some sections of society are “inherently” more powerful (often referred to as “higher”) than others. For this exact reason it’s generally difficult or outright impossible to move from an horizontal section to another. This “higher” strata of society are usually more structured than normal society and tend to have stronger in-group ties and to gather in particular locations or for particular rituals or ceremonies (not necessarily secret or religious in nature).
Vertical sections are instead based on factions and guilds (and not only lawful ones), and are fuelled by loyalty, skill and affiliations. These are much easier to switch, normally more meritocratic, and have an internal hierarchy that can be climbed, thus representing an avenue for social mobility (on the other hand they are known to foster nepotism and to favour the rich). The top levels of such structures can exert a decent amount of power through their position, and likely influence the political landscape at least at the regional level.
Putting everything together
The actual “procedure” at this point is almost secondary. It’s pretty much just a matter of picking a random number of powers from random tiers and assigning relative weights to them. All of this of course is subject to some constraints, and requires input from the other systems that prepare lists of ethnicities, guilds, cultures and historical events. In turn, it produces an ordered list to which I can apply patterns to figure out how those powers work together in the specified proportions.
Patterns are the other half of the recipe, and give coherence to the elements selected by the procedure. Patterns allow us to apply a human-friendly interpretation to otherwise cold numbers. They are the narrative equivalent of the rendering process in computer graphics: they take a “model” and spit out an actual picture.
In this first version, the patterns are limited to figuring out whether the institutions are solid or weak, and to clarify which elements of the official government wield real power over the masses.
Finishing touches
Once all of the players are defined, the source of their powers have been explored and the real and apparent hierarchies are settled, we are left with a few technical details to fill in such as the actual size and structure of each second- and third-tier power. Is the senate made of 10 or 100 senators? Are responsibilities split based on topic or is there merely a chain of approvals that each decision needs to go through? I won’t explore this for the moment, as some of these details are trivial and can be just randomly picked from a list of options, while others need input from other generators and will be better discussed in the future.
Another aspect in this process is that of giving the right names to each role in the government and to people in particular relationships with members of the government. This will work in conjunction with the family tree generator to provide a wide cast of celebrities that can take part in public affairs.
