Thank you for these questions, these are really good and interesting ones! I’m sorry for how long it took me to answer – I wanted to really dig into the report you linked. I hope you’re also ok with me doing these a little bit out of order, because I want to get a some context out of the way before giving you direct answers to your questions.
For those reading that haven’t looked through this report, here are the numbers we’re working with. If you look at turnout percentage, calculated as (Average # Individual Votes) / (# Endorsements on Delegate), for the feeders, you get the following list:
- The North Pacific: 40.87%
- The South Pacific: 39.04%
- The West Pacific: 33.70%
- The East Pacific: 29.47%
- The Pacific: 23.85%
So we can actually say that TSPers are more generally involved in the WA than other feeders, save TNP, to which we are not far behind. But the numbers you’re concerned with are how many TSPers vote in a way aligned with the Delegate. The report linked is concerned with raw voting power, so gives us an absolute net number. I want to adjust for size first, so pulled an alignment percentage for the feeders, calculated as (Average # Voters Aligned with Delegate) / (Average Total # Individual Votes). I got the following list:
- The West Pacific: 88.00%
- The Pacific: 84.81%
- The North Pacific: 76.99%
- The East Pacific: 76.67%
- The South Pacific: 58.44%
This is where we underperform, looking from a certain perspective. And is what you are pointing out. A lot of people participate in WA voting, but our official voting recommendations don’t hold as much sway over those voters as they do in other regions. I want to look at one more thing, though, pushing the report a step forward, calculating overall voting power with: # Endorsements on Delegate + (Average # Votes Aligned withe Delegate - Average # Votes Non-Aligned with Delegate). I got the following list:
- The North Pacific: 874.8
- The South Pacific: 488.0
- The West Pacific: 443.9
- The East Pacific: 396.8
- The Pacific: 369.0
So I do want to push back against the assertion that our voting power is low. Even considering the dissenting individual voters, our voting power is greater than any feeder save TNP. But we are lower than we potentially could be.
Any change we can make in this culture has to be tempered by a regional cultural norms. A big part of the reason the individual vote is split is our commitment to democracy that tolerates dissent. It is easier for TWP – essentially a dictatorship that rewards loyalty to its Delegate – to command votes in a certain way. General statements and pressure to vote alongside the rest of the region (which is also sometimes ordered by the Prime Minister) may not go over well.
What we can do is inform to the best of our ability. Right now, it is very easy, especially for primarily gameside folks, to overlook any reccomendation or context for a proposal outside of the displayed Delegate vote on the WA page. Particularly as we deepen a focus on the World Assembly, continue the newly-reinstated summaries that Valemora have been doing, and the like, we should do our best to make those pieces of information as easy to see and discuss as possible.
Finally, in regards to the Delegate: They can certainly be a mouthpiece for the government, as they are someone many gamesiders will look to for information, but we need to be intentional about not allowing the office to play an outsized political role.
Getting people involved in the World Assembly involves a lot of the same general themes I mentioned above: stoking discussion and making information/reccomendations known and available. I also expect that the upcoming clean slate is going to generate a lot of interest, which we should do our best to capitalize on.
As far as Endorsement Count, that really does simply rely on consistent messaging in everything we do, on top of the Delegate doing their part in tarting.