The Political Process

Free Download The Political Process Full Version Game for PC; it explores a dynamic world of politics in this turn-based political simulator. Create a character, run for political office, write legislation, balance budgets, and more as you move up the political hierarchy.

Overview of The Political Process

Explore a dynamic world of politics in this turn-based political simulator. Create a character, run for political office, write legislation, balance budgets, and more as you move up the political hierarchy.

Create a Custom Politician

Play as a Democrat or Republican in the American political system. Customize the name, age, and appearance of your character. Calculate your political ideology by selecting over 40 policy positions representing a different aspect of your social and fiscal doctrine. Play as any politician that you can imagine. Create a backstory for your character. For example, is your character a young progressive looking to improve the world one government policy at a time, a stubborn old libertarian trying to reduce the size of government, or a middle-aged moderate trying to bring practical compromise to politics? Create any backstory and motives for your character that you want. How you play is up to you.

Choose a District

You can play in any part of the country. Choose from all 50 states and over 3,000 counties. Each district is unique and based on actual live data.

Customize Your World

Fine-tune district details to create the world exactly as you want it. There are over 80 variables you can change in the advanced options, such as voter demographics, ideology, turnout, district population, poverty rates, and more.

Run for Political Office

You can run for nine political office positions across the city, state, and national levels. Available positions include school board, city council, mayor, state house, state senate, governor, U.S. House of Representatives, U.S. Senate, and the presidency. Use political strategy to defeat your opponents in primary and general elections. The electoral campaign process includes: creating a campaign platform, knocking on doors, coordinating volunteers, fundraising, holding rallies, conducting polls, and organizing marketing campaigns. Use a combination of these activities to increase name recognition, sway public opinion, influence voter enthusiasm, and raise voter turnout. For the ultimate election challenge, you can run for president. The presidential election is even more in-depth because you must decide how to divide your resources among all 50 states. Which states are guaranteed wins, which can you flip, and which can you ignore? Each state is different, so you must adjust your message accordingly. For example, will you go after the independent voters in swing states, increase voter turnout among your supporters, or use attack ads to decrease voter enthusiasm for your opponent? With the correct strategy, you may become the next president. But, your system cannot focus only on winning your election. To be a successful president, you will need a majority in Congress. That means that your party members need to win elections. To help party members win elections, you may need to campaign in states that you cannot win. Campaigning in such states may increase voter turnout enough to help members of your party win their elections. There are many strategic decisions to make when campaigning for president.

Write Legislation

Choose from over 80 types of legislation. You can choose legislation related to taxes, education, crime, health care, poverty, etc. For example, you can adjust tax rates, decrease Social Security benefits, eliminate food stamps, increase higher education grants, reduce jail lengths, create free community college, and more. Before legislation can become law, it must progress through the legislature - through committee hearings, amendments, and voting. Politicians will vote on the bill based on their unique ideologies and policy positions. If the legislation passes in the legislature, it will be sent to the executive branch (mayor, governor, or president) to be signed into law or vetoed. Legislation that becomes law will influence various in-game metrics.

Gain Political Influence

You will gain political points for every election you win and the law you pass. These are a representation of your political experience. Political issues play an essential role in the game. For example, in the legislature, they determine which committees you can join and whether you will be the chairperson of your committee. As the chairperson, you get to decide whether legislation related to your committee will receive a hearing. This effectively gives you the power to prevent legislation from becoming law. Political points also determine whether you become a party leader or caucus leader, which provides you with influence over how other politicians vote. Getting a leadership position requires many terms in office, but once you get one, you can have a significant impact as a politician.

Balance Budget

Leadership positions will allow you to create a budget, which the legislature must approve. Determine tax policy and decide how to distribute tax revenues. Choose which government programs you will support and which you will eliminate. Make tough decisions that could have a lasting impact on your constituents. Budgets in the game are based on real-life budget data and thus give a simplified but relatively accurate representation of the budget process. You will have to make budget decisions that real-life politicians make.

Actions Have Consequences

Everything you do as a politician has consequences—the things you say on the campaign trail influence voter enthusiasm, influencing voter turnout. A powerful campaign platform may lose you the independent vote. But, if your venue is too moderate, you may lose the primary election to a partisan opponent. How you vote on legislation influences your approval rating, affecting whether you have a primary challenger in the next election.
The laws you create can have complex effects by influencing over 100 metrics. For example, passing a law that eliminates food stamps will decrease childhood access to nutrition. Hungry children do not perform as well in school, so the high school graduation rate will decrease, which means more poverty, crime, and lower tax revenues (since students who withdraw from high school earn lower wages and pay fewer taxes). The higher crime rate will increase the number of criminals in jail, which will increase the jail budget, but the lower tax revenue means that you cannot afford an increase to the jail budget, so you will have to make budget cuts to some other program. Those budget cuts will influence even more metrics. It is a complex puzzle.
These kinds of decisions may require a lot of strategizing. How you campaign for the primary election may differ from how you campaign for the general election. You may make the political calculation that it is in your best interest to vote in favour of legislation that you dislike. Doing so may improve your relationship with an essential political caucus, giving you enough support to pass controversial legislation. On the other hand, you may decide not toher level of political office this election season because you would have to face an incumbent you are unlikely to defeat.
There are many variables to consider when making political calculations.

Explore a Dynamic World of Politics

The world is filled with over 600 procedurally-generated politicians with unique ideologies, personalities, and careers. The game simulates primary and general elections for every politician, and you can see these election results at the end of every election. Cheer on colleagues as they run for higher office. Watch the presidential election results come in with anticipation about which party will control the executive branch. Then, view the results for house and senate elections to determine which party will hold the Congress. Did any colleagues or rivals lose their elections? The world is constantly changing as politicians retire, seek higher-level positions, or lose a primary election to an up-and-coming challenger. Politicians have ambitions; like you, they will try to ascend the political hierarchy. You may see a city council member rise to the governor level; you can watch colleagues in the senate run for the presidency.
You can watch as the political balance changes over time and predict how changing government approval ratings will influence the next election.
All of these background events help to produce a more engaging political world.
Outside the political world, there is also the world of your constituents. The game simulates over 100 metrics based on default conditions and government policies. Watch how metrics change over time based on the policies that you and your colleagues create. For example, will you reduce poverty, improve education, and eliminate the federal deficit?

Control the Fate of Your Party

One of the playable positions in the game is the Campaign Committee Chairperson. In this position, you are responsible for electing party members to office. Recruit candidates and fine-tune their policies. Use party resources to sway public opinion and increase voter turnout to select as many party members as possible. This position can potentially impact your political party's ideology and success significantly. If you are unhappy with a party member, you can select a candidate to challenge them in the next primary. If your party is becoming too radical, you can recruit moderate candidates to represent the next generation of your party.
Be strategic in the candidates you choose. You may be able to win competitive districts if you are clever in the policies you select for your candidates.
Use financial resources wisely - will you focus on increasing voter turnout, or will you play the long game and gradually, throughout many elections, use marketing to sway public opinion and change the party ideology to more closely match your own?

Dictator Mode

In dictator mode, you can play as the president as long as you want without winning reelection. Write legislation and control the budget without interference from Congress. Use Dictator Mode to test various ways to balance the federal budget or see how different laws influence the country. Create any variety of policies that you want.

Election Simulator

Use the Election Simulator tool to predict any election. Adjust public opinion, candidate attributes, party demographics, and more. The game will predict the winner based on the values you provide.

Features of The Political Process

• The game attempts to be a realistic but simplified simulation of politics. Like real-life politics, it cannot be easy. Some elections cannot be won. Some legislation cannot be passed. Understanding this must be part of your political strategy. In what districts can you win an election? What legislation can you give? These are the kinds of questions you have to consider as a politician. However, the challenging aspects of the game make your accomplishments more rewarding.
• If audio is an essential element of your playing experience, you should be aware that the audio quality in this game is currently not very good. The game has three sounds: clicking a button, clicking a tab, and an alert sound when new events are added to your schedule. If you dislike the default sound effects, each sound effect can be changed from a selection of several options. All sounds in the game can be muted. The game currently has four (low-quality) songs that play in a loop and are, by default, muted. They can be unmuted in the options menu. If you do not want to play the game in silence, feel free to play your favourite music, ambient noises, or relaxing nature sounds in the background.
• Election campaigns become more interesting as you seek higher-level positions. In low-level functions, such as school board or city council, you have very few resources, which limits how much you can do to influence the election. Higher-level positions such as the senate and house of representatives will provide you with more resources and opportunities, making higher-level election campaigns more engaging.
• There is no tutorial; you must navigate the political world independently. However, the receipts page explains many of the game's features and advises how to play the game. If you read the concepts page and explore all of the tabs in the game, you should have a decent understanding of how to play. You will be instructed to locate the concepts page when the fun begins.
• There are no win conditions in the game. You play the life of a politician and retire whenever you want. So the end of your endpoint term as president is a reasonable endpoint for the game.
• Some aspects of a politician's life are repetitive: knocking on doors, fundraising, and attending rallies. These activities can also be redundant in the game but are not too time-consuming to complete.
• When running for political office, you must run as a Democrat or a Republican. You cannot play as an independent. However, even though you have to campaign as a Democrat or Republican, you do not have to act like them. You can play with whatever ideology and policy combinations that you want.
• Many of the playable positions are very similar - playing as a state representative is not different from playing as a state senator.
• There is no option to veto appropriation (budget) legislation. Budget legislation automatically becomes law because there is currently no mechanism to simulate shutting down the government.
• If you are not interested in the game in its current state, consider adding it to your wishlist. Then, as new updates are released, you can evaluate whether the new content is something you are interested in playing.
• Since the game is in early access, features can change or be added. This means that any of the aspects above can be improved based on community input. Suggestions for improvement are welcome and encouraged.

Minimum System Requirements

• Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
• OS: Windows 10 64-bit
• Processor: 2 Ghz
• Memory: 2 GB RAM
• Storage: 500 MB available space

Recommended System Requirements

• Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
• OS: Windows 10 64-bit
• Processor: 2 Ghz
• Memory: 2 GB RAM
• Storage: 500 MB available space