Voter Demands & Pledges¶

Every so often, the voters of a country stop waiting to be asked and simply make a demand. It's specific, it's numeric, and it's grounded in something genuinely wrong with the nation's finances: a tax band that's punishingly high compared to similar countries, a service that's starved next to your peers, or — for a country under an IMF programme — the demand to get the country back.

Answering the call is free and popular. Delivering on it is neither. This page is about that gap.

What a demand is¶

A voter demand is a single, concrete fiscal ask that the electorate has decided it cares about. It isn't a vague mood — it's a target with a number attached, and the number is real. Demands only appear where your country is a genuine outlier against its peer countries, and the target is always challenging rather than a freebie.

There are three kinds:

Demand	What voters are asking for	How it reads
Tax cut	Bring a specific income band's tax rate down — a real cut, though not all the way to the peer average	"Taxes on middle incomes are way too high! Cut the medium-earner rate from 32% to 25%."
Spending rise	Lift spending in a starved category a real step closer to what comparable countries spend	"Our schools are falling behind! Raise education spending closer to our neighbours."
End IMF control	Get the country out of its IMF programme	"Enough austerity — get the IMF out of our country."

The exact wording is generated fresh each time in an angry-but-plausible voter voice, but the figures underneath it are snapshotted from the real state of your economy the moment the demand is issued — and they never change afterwards, even if peer averages drift. The demand is a fixed, published ask.

Targets close nearly all of the gap

A demand's target doesn't ask you to fully match your peers — it closes roughly 90% of the gap to the peer benchmark and lands on a clean, round number, so the ask is exactly hittable rather than a jarring "cut to 36.7%". A tax cut always removes at least 5 points off the band's rate, and a spending rise always adds at least 25%, so even a narrow gap produces a demand worth fighting over.

Demands are one-sided on purpose

Voters only ever demand lower taxes or more spending (or their country back). Nobody marches for a balanced budget. That's the whole tension: each demand is individually popular and, taken together, fiscally reckless. Being loved and being responsible are not the same move — and the system is built around that fact.

Not every demand looks to your neighbours

Most demands are grounded in a real comparison against peer countries — but occasionally (about one in four), the voters don't bother comparing at all. They simply decide a tax band should be slashed to next to nothing, or a spending line should be doubled or tripled, with no peer benchmark behind the number. These arbitrary demands look and behave exactly like any other demand — same pledging, same delivery conditions, same judgment at the ballot box — they just aren't chasing what anyone else is doing.

The IMF special case¶

If your country is under an IMF programme, its voters have exactly one thing on their mind: end IMF control. While the programme runs, no tax-cut or spend-rise demands can appear — the emergency austerity budget forbids delivering them anyway. This is the one demand in the game that is fiscally responsible to keep: delivering it means holding the line on austerity long enough for the programme to end. Pledging it is just as cheap as any other pledge — but keeping it asks the opposite muscle to all the rest.

The lifecycle¶

A demand moves through its life on the rhythm of your country's elections. Two elections matter, and it helps to name them:

  Demand issued
       │
     open ──────────────►  in delivery  ──────────────►  judged
   (pledge here)      Election 1                    Election 2
                  (accountability)                  (judgment)

Open — the demand is live and parties can pledge. This lasts until the next election runs in the country — the accountability election. That election closes pledging.
In delivery — pledging is shut, and the clock is running. Every party that pledged is now on the hook to see the demand delivered before the judgment election — the first election held at least two months after the accountability election.
Judged — at the judgment election, each pledging party faces the reckoning (see The hangover).

At any point before judgment, if the demand is delivered, it's marked fulfilled and the whole thing short-circuits — every pledger is safe, and no reckoning ever comes. Fulfilment is sticky: once delivered, always delivered, even if a later budget reverses the change.

You get at least two months to deliver

The judgment election isn't just "the very next election" — it's the next one held at least two months after the accountability election. An election that lands inside that window (say, a snap election a few weeks later) is ignored for judgment: the demand simply carries forward, unjudged, to the next qualifying election. This isn't a pardon — you're not let off, just not judged yet — but it guarantees you a real chance to pass a delivering budget before the penalty can land.

Elections are counted by date, as they actually run

"The next election" means the next one that actually happens, whichever chamber it's in. Call a snap election and you pull the whole timeline forward; a delayed election pushes it back (subject to the two-month delivery window above). If two chambers vote on the same day, that's one election event.

Pledging: the cheap dopamine¶

While a demand is open, any party in the country can pledge to deliver it. Here's the deal.

It costs nothing. No political power, no approval vote, no risk today. The price is entirely deferred.

You must publish a plan. Pledging isn't a bare button — your party has to write a short delivery plan (40–1,000 characters) saying how it intends to make good. It's moderated like any public text, it's immutable once submitted (a pledge is a public commitment — no quiet rewording later), and it's pure flavour: it has no mechanical effect whatsoever on the boost, on judgment, or on anything else. It exists so your promise has a voice. A journalist may even quote a line of it.

You get the boost. The moment you pledge, your party earns the People's Pledge — voters become about 5% more likely to vote for you (a ×1.05 multiplier on your vote preference). It's one of the strongest positive boosts in the game, and it lasts until the next election including that election itself. That's the point of pledging: you cash the popularity at the accountability election, win seats on the strength of a promise, and worry about delivery later.

There's no penalty for not pledging, and no effect on parties that stay quiet. An opposition party that expects to stay out of power can pledge freely and simply pocket the boost. That's not a loophole — it's realistic, and it's intended.

The boost doesn't stack — liability does

Pledge two open demands at once and you still hold a single People's Pledge boost (its expiry just extends). You can't farm popularity by pledge-spamming. But each pledge is a separate commitment come judgment day — so while the upside is capped, the downside adds up.

The hangover¶

At the judgment election, every party still on the hook is judged on two questions, both answered right there and then:

Do you hold power?
Was the demand delivered?

The cross of those two answers decides your fate.

Not in power → you're off the hook. The boost was banked long ago, and there's no downside. Nobody brands an opposition party for a budget it couldn't pass.
In power and delivered → safe. You promised, you held power, the country got what it asked for. That's a promise kept.
In power and not delivered → Broken Promises. Your party is branded: voters become about 15% less likely to vote for you (a ×0.85 multiplier), and it lasts a punishing two years.

The sting in the tail: the Broken Promises brand is applied before the judgment election simulates. So it doesn't just wait for next time — it drags down your result in the very election where you're judged, and then keeps hurting for two years, which on an annual cycle means it bites at the next election too.

The power test, in detail¶

You "hold power" at judgment if any of these is true, checked against the state of the country at that moment:

#	Test	You hold power if…
1	Cabinet	your party holds a current cabinet seat
2	Single-seat office	you hold any single-seat legislature (e.g. a presidency) in the country
3	Top-3 with presence	in any multi-seat legislature you're top 3 by seats and hold at least 10% of the seats

The 10% floor matters: a tiny third party clinging to a handful of seats in a big chamber is not "in power" and won't be crushed for a budget it could never move. Being top-3 with a real presence is the spirit of the rule.

Power is measured at judgment day — the government of the day answers for the record. One consequence, accepted for simplicity: a party that leaves the cabinet a week before the judgment election escapes, and one that joins a week before is on the hook. Cabinet churn between elections is rare, and "when the voters came back, were you in charge?" is the natural question to ask.

The asymmetry¶

The boost and the brand are deliberately unequal — that's what makes the choice real:

	People's Pledge (boost)	Broken Promises (brand)
Effect on your vote	×1.05 (≈5% more likely)	×0.85 (≈15% less likely)
Duration	until the next election (often much less than a year)	24 months
Who gets it	every party that pledges	only pledgers who hold power and didn't deliver
Elections affected	1	typically 2

The brand is far bigger than the boost, lasts far longer, and lands on an election. Pledging is a good bet if you won't be in power — and a terrible one if you'll win but can't deliver.

Delivery is collective¶

Here's the trap under the trap: delivering a demand isn't up to you alone.

A tax-cut or spend-rise demand is delivered by a passed budget that hits the target — the personal-income rate for the band falls to (or below) the number, or spending in the category rises to (or above) it. The end-IMF demand is delivered when the programme actually ends (debt-to-GDP recovers and the IMF flow releases the country).

But budgets need a majority to pass. Fulfilment is a property of the country's state, not of who proposed what. It doesn't matter whose name is on the budget — if a passing budget reaches the target, the demand is delivered for everyone who pledged. And if no budget can assemble a majority to move the number, the demand stays unmet no matter how sincerely you meant it.

That's why the promise and the delivery can come apart so brutally. You pledge alone and cash the boost alone. But you can only deliver together — and if you win power without the votes to pass the budget, you're branded for a promise the chamber wouldn't let you keep.

The winner's trap

The temptation is strongest for the party most likely to win — and so is the danger. Over-promise your way to victory, then find you can't build a budget majority for the cut you swore to make, and the judgment election turns the People's Pledge into a Broken Promises brand at the worst possible moment. Only pledge what your likely coalition can actually pass.

The opposition's free lunch — and the one honest pledge

If you're confident you'll be in opposition come judgment day, pledging is close to free money: you take the boost and you're off the hook when power is tested. Oppositions over-promise for a reason.

The exception is end IMF control — the one pledge you keep by being disciplined, not generous. Delivering it means sustained austerity until the programme exits. It's the only demand where keeping your word costs you nothing at the ballot box and everything in fiscal willpower.

Where to find demands in-game¶

Demands are hard to miss — that's by design, so the hangover feels inevitable rather than sprung on you.

Dashboard card — a prominent card on your player dashboard tracks your country's demands in two halves: the live demands you can still pledge to (with a clear "you have / have not pledged" marker), and your in-delivery commitments that bite at the next election — each with a live "delivered ✓ / not yet delivered" check and a risk cue reading your current power status ("you hold power — this will bite" vs "you're not in power"). It's the drumbeat that keeps the reckoning in view.
Demand detail page — the full headline and narrative, three grounding numbers (Previous, the value frozen at issuance; Right now, today's live figure, colour-coded to show whether the target's been hit; and What voters want, the target), the lifecycle status, the roster of every pledging party with their plan and outcome, the country's next election date, and the pledge form for eligible leaders. The form spells the deal out before you commit.
Country page and economy page — a "The voters demand" card for any live demand, with recent resolved demands listed beneath.
Budget page — while a budget vote is open (and live in the budget editor, before you even propose), the page shows the whole resulting budget — every tax band and spending category, current → proposed, per capita and against the peer median — plus a card for every live demand: its target, today's value, the value under this budget, and a clear ✅ would be delivered / ❌ would not be delivered verdict, with the shortfall spelled out in $/person or percentage points when it falls short.

Your party page also shows the People's Pledge or Broken Promises badges (with tooltips) whenever they're active, alongside a list of your party's pledges and their outcomes.

Next steps¶

Elections & Voters — the elections that open, close, and judge every demand.
Economy — how budgets deliver demands, and how the IMF programme ends.
Legislation & Voting — the wider record voters judge you on.
Global Decisions — the game's other public, reason-required commitment — a world-wide vote instead of a single-country pledge.
Strategy Guide — timing, positioning, and when a promise is worth the risk.