- Pronouns
- he / him / his
"Is Europeia Actually Less Political Than Before, Or Is It All Nonsense?"Written by HEM
One of the most frequently debated questions in Europeia over the last few years has been whether the region is more "boring" politically than it used to be. Are citizens less engaged in politics, and more devoted to the social scene of the region? Is our region slowly transitioning from the world's premier political region, to simply a popular hangout spot?
To answer some of these questions, I turned to Senate election statistics. Here's how I did it.
METHODOLOGY
I went through the entire Voting Booth archives and collected three pieces of information from every Senate election.
(1) The number of candidates running
(2) The total number of votes cast
(3) The number of Senate seats up for election.
Using this information, I defined the following variables.
Activity = The total number of votes divided by the number of Senate seats. That's to say, if a lot of people are voting in our region, the region is more active. More votes = more members = more activity.
This measure of regional activity, at least upon first glance, appears to be superior to the ancient "post count" measure of activity. This measure shows how many members are engaged enough to be on the forum during a 24 hour period, and find a poll to vote in it. This seems to be a better measure than "post count" which can be unduly influenced by spam games and special events.
Political Activity = The number of Senate candidates divided by activity. That's to say, the more people we have running for Senate in proportion to people casting votes, the more political activity we have.
To illustrate my methodology further, here is a basic example:
Let's assume Europeia has 10 citizens, and that all 10 citizens are running for Senate, and all 10 citizens cast 7 votes for a 7 person Senate:
Example! | |
---|---|
Senate candidates: | 10 |
Senate votes: | 70 |
Number of seats: | 7 |
Activity: (Votes per seat): | 10 |
Political activity: (Number of Candidates / Activity): | 1 |
In this situation we have "perfect political activity" because every single citizen is participating in Senate elections by both voting and running for a Senate seat. This scenario is (of course) totally infeasible. But it helps to explain how the data will be displayed. The closer the political activity coefficient is to "1" the more political activity Europeia has. The closer the political activity coefficient is to "0" the less political activity Europeia has.
POLITICAL ACTIVITY OVER TIME
Here is the resulting graph of "political activity" over time:
There has been, on average, a slow decline in political activity over the course of Europeia's existence. This general trend was briefly rebuked throughout 2014, but since, has seen a dramatic drop-off in political activity and participation.
As political activity reaches its lowest points in history, ironically, regional activity has reached some of it's highest — by far:
More people have been voting in Senate elections — relative to the number of seats — than any point in Europeian history (by far). Our citizenry is very attuned to elections, and very keen to vote, even in Senate elections that have typically attracted far less fanfare than Presidential elections.
Why is Europeia experiencing the highest activity ever at the same time we are experiencing the lowest political activity of all time?
IS PERMANENT GROUPCHAT TO BLAME?
Over the last few months and days, many people have saddled Europeia's "groupchat" culture with the blame. While Europeians have often used off-site messaging services (prominently MSN Messenger), only since January 2014 have we seen permanent-standing group chats such as EuroChat on Skype, or our Discord servers. While previously off-site services were used for individual chats, or temporary group chats, the bulk of social activity took place on forum. Now, permanent group chat rooms can allow for an increasing level of socialization (and perhaps politiking) to take place away from Europeia. Some people have claimed that this has watered down Europeia as a region, and resulted in a decreased interest in politics.
I split up some of the data and compared the median political activity from July 2007 — December 2013 and February 2014 — October 2016.
The differences are telling:
Median Political Activity | |
---|---|
Pre-EuroChat | 0.46 |
Post-EuroChat | 0.32 |
Remember 1.0 is perfect political activity, 0.0 is no political activity
When comparing the two eras, there is almost a 15% drop in political activity after the introduction of permanent group-chat services.
ARE THERE OTHER FACTORS?
Maybe. Here I took the political activity chart and added some lines to represent important events in Europeian history that might be impacting these numbers.
Key | |
---|---|
Color | Event |
Pink | Introduction of Civil Service |
Green | Creation of Electoral Panel |
Orange | Shift of Senate elections from concurrent with Presidentials, to Midterm style |
Yellow | Popularization of "EuroChat" on Skype |
Red | Popularization of Discord |
In order they appear on chart from left to right
Just looking at the chart qualitatively, it's difficult to see any clear causation. Even if the introduction of EuroChat on Skype is followed by the political activity "resurgence" through 2014, which seems to suggest a positive impact, not negative (though again, the numbers do suggest that median political activity is down compared to before its introduction).
There are many who believe the shift from having Senate elections concurrently to midterm elections was a boon for the Senate. You could argue that the negative impacts of EuroChat on Skype was partially offset by the shift by the long-term effects of the new election system.
Indeed, so much change was happening in Europeian culture from 2013 - 2015 there are many ways to interpret the data. What was helping? What was hurting? What wasn't having an impact at all? It's hard to say.
CONCLUSION
Based on the data, it seems undeniable that political activity in Europeia is down from any point in history. However, it also appears that "total" activity is up, perhaps at unprecedented levels.
The data also seems to suggest that the introduction of permanent group chat services like EuroChat on Skype, and Discord, have had a negative impact on political activity (a 15% drop). However, there are a number of other factors that could have resulted in the decline, and it is thoroughly difficult to attribute historical fluctuations to any single event.
CAVEATS & COUNTER ARGUMENTS
There are some other important issues that were not discussed, however.
(1) Bad Data
Unfortunately, a number of polls have been tainted by (evil) people voting after the respective elections. Indeed, there are a few polls from 2007 that have a political activity coefficient over "1" which is literally impossible. While I imagine that political activity in 2007 was very high, we don't know exactly how high, or how many bogus votes that were cast.
(2) My metrics
My argument hinges on the notion that the number of people running for Senate can be effective stand-in for total political activity in the region. The biggest rebuttal to this may be that this is not an effective metric. Some may say that more people may simply be interested in executive involvement, and may be seeking more assistant ministry jobs than running for Senate.
This is an important argument, however I am skeptical. Political activity (as defined by the number of people running for Senate divided by total activity) after the introduction of the original Civil Service (the biggest expansion of the executive branch in our history, was fairly steady through the next two years with only "normal" fluctuations. If executive involvement were solely responsible for people not running for Senate, I would expect a huge drop-off in the months after the Civil Service's creation.
(3) Specialization Rebuttal
This is similar to (2). Basically, as group sizes get larger, people tend to specialize. That is to say, as Europeia grew in numbers and total activity, people gravitate toward "focus areas". While in 2007 it might have been necessary for someone to hold jobs in two different branches — so maybe almost everyone runs for Senate — in 2016 it is possible to just focus on cultural pursuits, or Cabinet jobs.
That is to say, people may argue that Senate candidacy may be a bad metric for "political activity" because less people will tend to be interested in law-writing as the region grows larger.
This argument is probably the one I was most cognizant of when using Senate figures to extrapolate conclusions about the region. However, I hold the belief that specialization cannot explain the drop off in Senate candidates better than decreased political activity and interest does. Specialization assumes that people are going elsewhere to be politically involved while the political activity theory assumes these people are simply not interested or engaged in Europeian politics at all. For the specialization theory to disprove the conclusions I've made here, it has to shown me where people have gone. However, the Cabinet tends to have a (roughly) fixed number of positions. Sub-Cabinet positions do exist, however there is no evidence that growth of the executive department with the Civil Service's creation in 2009 drastically impacted Senate elections. This is qualitative, but there certainly is no evidence that the press is more active (on median) than it was previously.
Because of those factors, I do not believe people are "specializing" they are just not politically involved, and hence the use of Senate candidacy figures to stand-in for the measure of political activity is appropriate.
(4) Vote Casting Rebuttal
The use of number of votes per seat to represent total activity hinges on the assumption that all citizens cast the total number of votes available to them through history. Or, at least, the variance among the number of votes cast by each citizen through history is consistent. If, for some reason, voters were more picky with their Senate votes in early Europeian history, and suddenly they became less picky over time, it could make it look like less Senate candidates are running compared to total votes per candidate when actually just more votes are being cast.
I can't think of any reason this would be the case, but it is a valid counter-argument.