Mid-Term Approval Polling: ProfessorHenn Cabinet (November 1, 2023 – February 1, 2023)

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Today brings the halfway mark for the current Prime Minister term. How are we feeling about the term so far?

Polls are open to citizens. Responses to these polls are fully anonymous; only the overall results will be visible.

What is your overall level of approval or disapproval with Prime Minister @ProfessorHenn’s administration so far this term? (5 = Highly Approve; 1 = Highly Disapprove)
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What is your overall level of approval or disapproval with @ProfessorHenn as Prime Minister so far this term? (5 = Highly Approve; 1 = Highly Disapprove)
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What is your overall level of approval or disapproval with @Legend as Minister of Culture so far this term? (5 = Highly Approve; 1 = Highly Disapprove)
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What is your overall level of approval or disapproval with @ConcreteSlab as Minister of Foreign Affairs so far this term? (5 = Highly Approve; 1 = Highly Disapprove)
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What is your overall level of approval or disapproval with @Banexet as Minister of Defense so far this term? (5 = Highly Approve; 1 = Highly Disapprove)
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What is your overall level of approval or disapproval with @USoVietnam as Minister of Integration so far this term? (5 = Highly Approve; 1 = Highly Disapprove)
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What is your overall level of approval or disapproval with @Of_the_Ages as Minister of Roleplay so far this term? (5 = Highly Approve; 1 = Highly Disapprove)
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What is your overall level of approval or disapproval with @EmC as Director of the Office of World Assembly Legislation so far this term? (5 = Highly Approve; 1 = Highly Disapprove)
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Which issues do you feel should be a priority for ProfessorHenn’s administration? (select as few or as many as you’d like)
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And the results are in! Here’s the breakdown of the approval poll results:

Approval Poll Results

If the last approval poll told the story of a term that exceeded the sum of its parts, these poll results seem to suggest a term where there’s definitely one key part stealing the show: the Prime Minister.

ProfessorHenn’s personal approval rating comes in at a very solid 4.36, 0.31 points above their rating at the end of the previous term. Not a single respondent gave Henn less than a 4, propelling them to the highest approval rating of any member of the administration in this poll. Of course, only time will tell if they’ll maintain this level of approval for the remainder of this term as well. With reelection off the table, will they seek to invest more of their political capital in bringing their policies to fruition? Or is the fact that Henn won’t be running for reelection perhaps a factor in their high approval rating in the first place?

But wait! While Henn’s approval rating has risen, the administration’s overall approval rating hasn’t. In fact, it’s down 0.39 points from the approval rating earned by the previous administration at the end of their term. And yet, members of this administration, on average, actually have higher personal approval ratings than members of the last administration. So what gives?

One explanation is that it’s simply a return to the norm. In our last approval polls, the administration’s overall approval rating was higher than the personal approval rating earned by any of its members. Perhaps citizens are simply adopting a more grounded approach to evaluating the administration as a whole. At the same time, if we look at the administration members and the ministries making a return from the previous term, there are some interesting changes.

We’ve already talked about Henn’s ratings here, but they weren’t the only returning member of the administration. Em’s ratings as OWL director are essentially unchanged, but the same cannot be said for Legend. Their approval rating of 3.42 as Minister of Culture is 0.63 points below their approval rating as Minister of On-Site Events last term, driven by more polarized opinions on their performance as a minister. At the end of the last term, Legend didn’t receive any ratings below a 3 while over a third of respondents gave them a 5. In this poll, they still earned a 5 from a third of respondents, but a quarter of respondents gave them just a 1. It’s possible that while their core political base has held steady, the views of other citizens have begun to sour.

Among returning ministries, we likewise have a mixed bag. Approval ratings for the Minister of Defense position remain high, with Drew Durrnil earning a rating of 4.23, edging out Kotoha Tanaka’s rating last term. Meanwhile, Concrete Slab’s leadership in foreign affairs has earned them an approval rating of 3.93, which is 0.25 points above HumanSanity’s exit score. Conversely, though to a lesser extent, USoVietnam comes in with an approval rating of 3.79, a tenth of a point below Pronoun’s rating at the end of the last term.

All of that said, we’re still a month away from the next round of elections and only halfway through the term. There’s still time for plenty to change. Will the high flyers keep soaring? Will an underdog make a sudden comeback? I guess we’ll find out in the coming month or two, one way or another!

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I wrote a longer post and realized it was a bit rambly, so I’ll keep it shorter. Looking at past approval polls, and then the subsequent nominations and elections that we see, I’ve noticed a bit of a disconnect. People will give a Minister mid-tier approval ratings and then vote to approve their nomination or re-election in droves. (Take, for example, my approvals after the first Henn “mega-Cabinet” 2/23-7/23, where I received a 3.08 as Minister of Foreign Affairs after resigning in scandal only to be confirmed in the 7/23-10/23 term with 27 of 28 votes.) This indicates to me a disconnect between what we expect out of our Ministers and then how we judge them when we get our opportunity to give input on who our Ministers should be once a term.

A second point I wanted to raise is that I think we should talk about what are the things we want from our Ministers and are we using those things to guide how we rate them? For example: 4 was the most common rating for the administration as a whole. Did we just all give the executive a 4 because “well, I haven’t been that impressed, but they haven’t messed anything up that bad yet” or did we give them a 4 because they’re accomplishing most (but not all) of the things we want out of them. Same for Prime Minister ProfessorHenn, who no one (including me) gave below a 4. Something tells me (in part thinking about my own logic) it was for similar reasons. I imagine there are more nuanced reasons for the other Cabinet Ministers, but I am curious what these were and what specific expectations we had for the Cabinet that were (or weren’t) being met.

I can say some of mine:

  • I gave Legend a 1. I haven’t seen a successful event announced yet this term and I’ve haven’t seen an event at all in a month. For a Minister of Culture, especially a returning one, I want to see high-quality, well administered, high-engagement events … which aren’t happening.
  • I gave Slab a 4, I think. I mean, we haven’t had any screw ups, and pulling South Pacific’s embassy at the moment we did was probably good, but I’m not sure what Slab’s vision for the term is or how he plans to get us there. Arguably, it’s trying to grow Aegis and PfS, but I don’t think we’ve really done that.
  • I gave Drew a 5. For those who didn’t, why? What did you want from Drew that he didn’t deliver on? Pretty much all our MoDs of late have been utterly fantastic, and I’m eternally confused why they don’t sweep these polls.
  • I gave Viet a low rating. Call me a hater, but this term is turning out how I expected based on Viet’s past MoE terms – e.g. a lot of things are being moved around, paperwork generated, and bureaucracy created, but no programs are actually being commissioned that are having an observable impact. We seem likely to end up with yet another set of 10 page plans for programs that are impossible to actually run. Worse, there’s been no public communication about what is in progress. For people who gave Viet a 4 or a 5, what have you seen accomplished this term that you’re excited about? Or at the very least planned?
  • I think I gave Of_the_Ages a 3? I mean, admittedly, I don’t know much about RP, otherwise I would’ve been harsher, but I’m not sure what they accomplished. For the people giving out 5s, what’s been accomplished that you’re excited about.
  • Em’s ratings are about what I expected. She’s taken over a job no one wanted and has been doing it consistently some-but-not-every-vote. And that’s not perfect by any means, but better than what any other person would be doing, and consistent with what was happening last term.
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This is a fair observation, but I also think the Assembly is in a tight spot when it comes to providing “input” on Ministers. If the Assembly rejects a ministerial appointment, the result is that no one fills the post until the PM nominates a new candidate and that candidate proceeds through the confirmation process. It strikes me that sets the bar for rejecting a nomination very low (or high, depending on how you look at it). Because I imagine many members of the Assembly that don’t fully support a given nominee think something like: eh, this person wouldn’t be my first choice, but they are better than not having anyone for a few weeks, especially since I have no idea who the PM’s fallback would be–I might support them even less!

I guess that point is somewhat of a non sequitur, as it doesn’t have any actionable takeaway. But it perhaps explains some of the phenomenon you are observing.

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I think this is a cultural problem, then. If a candidate has been a Minister in the recent past and has proven to be mediocre or controversial (like me!) then the Assembly has every reason to consider rejecting the nomination. We should be more willing to vote no on nominations than we currently are.

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I would like to preface this by stating that, to prevent a constant restating of the same point, that my primary focus in TSP is TSPRP. I very rarely interact with the site anymore (There is a good chance Ikaranara is CTEd right now) and I am mainly here for rp. For instance, my opinion on baxnet as MoD is moot, because I don’t really care about Raiding/Defending.

Here are my opinions on how the two ministries I really care about have fared/should fare.

MoC: I was on the team working through the project, and I was excited to see some of our plans come out. We didn’t really get much communication from Henn providing any sort of useful oversight (or even a good “Hurry the hell up”) And I felt that, if slow, most of the ideas we had were fairly solid. It was sad to see the rather sudden “MoC is disbanded.” Even if this doesn’t translate into outside of the Ministry, I would hardly say that Legend’s leadership was deserving of a 1.

MoRP: As a RPer myself, I don’t expect a whole lot from the MoRP. Their main goals in my eyes are to provide a conduit for the Roleplay community for any government-related changes that could affect RP visibility, or to coordinate events in relation to TSPRP. The latter, in my opinion, is not extremely important; if you were to ever look in the A1-0 or Pacifica categories, or to the wiki, where our articles make up the vast majority of articles created and updated, you would see that RP is mostly self-sustaining as long as we are visible enough to gain more active members than we lose. This does not mean that MoRP’s coordination in other matters like Extra-canon events is irrelevant entirely, and it would be nice to see a future MoRP or MoC if the cabinets get merged do some activity events to promote joining RP (especially to Auora, whose userbase is not yet self-sustaining.)

Additionally, to add onto the last paragraph, having a MoRP or just having a Rper in the administration signals to me that the administration will make some sort of effort to not completely ignore the existence of the TSPRP community. I personally feel like (and the poll above signifies) that the majority of people participating in Government either don’t care about TSPRP, or don’t even know it exists. (This, FYI, was why Zanny was third in my vote. In response to my query about plans for RP or a MoRP his response was entirely about Knowhere and only one sentence could have been nebulously interpreted as applying to the RP community here on the forums.)

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Fair enough on having that extra boost within the executive, but what’s stopping other roleplayers from asking questions of the Prime Minister or Minister of Roleplay on what they’re doing for RP, whether it’s integration materials or otherwise?

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It removes a step in the process- the MoRP can be more proactive than RPers whose low activity within gameside limits their knowledge on these issues. A MoRP who is both active in government and RP can spot issues early, or propose resolutions to issues that would slip the mind of less involved (in government) rpers.

I also think, that besides that, there actually should be more communication between the Ministries in general (But especially a ministry that represents an entire facet of TSP’s community) should communicate more with the people they are working for. Perhaps, and this may be a bit off topic, each ministry could publish a general “State of affairs” each month outlining what they’ve done, what they failed to do, and what their agenda moving forward is.

This also isn’t stating a MoRP is strictly necessary- In my opinion, after a few terms of having one, their expected role is similar to MoC in a lot of ways. I think even having a “RP Advisor” in the MoC would go a long way to promoting the interests of TSPRP.

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To that end, this current administration has several advisors from several RP canons, and it is within the power of citizens who participate in RP to petition for more presentation as well (such as through a political party that is a force to be reckoned with. . .).

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Speaking as an active roleplayer, I can say that I’ve found several cases where I’ve said “That seems like something that the Ministry of Roleplay should be doing” to myself. I don’t believe that the primary reason for a Minister of Roleplay to exist should be to coordinate events, or even to provide government representation; we have a Ministry of Culture or similar to run events, and we can get representatives other than a roleplay ministry that has failed to meet the baseline performance expectations of non-roleplayers for two out of two terms with its current responsibilities.

While I do recognize the needs for roleplay representation in government, I believe that the Ministry of Roleplay should be about more than that. I’m currently writing a proposal to radically change what the Ministry of Roleplay is expected to be and do; it’s currently being refined and will need to be peer reviewed later, but I hope that it will fix the problems that have made the current incarnation of the MoRP a consecutive series of disappointments.

Anyway, on to my reviews of the only 2 ministries that I interact with:

Ministry of Culture: 2
I will be the first to admit that the MoC term that I was a part of was rather disappointing in nature; we didn’t really keep as much regular event activity as we probably should have, and generally prioritized a long-term, not-insignificantly-sized project instead. I hope that the wiki competition that I will be running soon will help rectify some of the near-term event drought, as well as demonstrate its feasibility as a staple event that can be held somewhat regularly in the future.

Ministry of Roleplay: 4
The MoRP didn’t really do much this term. That sounds disappointing at first glance; but as Flaming said above, the Ministry of Roleplay is mostly there to exist as a voice in government for TSPRP and not to actually do that much on a regular basis. I think that there were some missed opportunities to expand its impact and make it something that can post more tangible achievements, but my assessment is that the MoRP performed well enough relative to what it’s expected to do by the people that it represents.

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I mean, fair enough, but we didn’t exactly do nothing. The reason I had a team was so I wouldn’t have to do everything on my own. Yes, the media project would be my own, but the bug project we all worked on, the rmb debates we all talked about. We could have done more, yes, but we certainly could have done less. And the fruits of our labors were so very close to ripening.

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What cases in particular, if you’d like to elaborate?

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Some of the main cases involve creating and maintaining RP-related community pages and guides like this and this, as well as transferring info from some of the more canon-critical roleplays from the old forums onto TSPedia. I was also thinking about potentially having it be the “official” body to help new roleplayers with things like learning about the canons (which is especially critical right now, with important roleplays like Pacifica’s Reizen Civil War still sequestered on the old forums) and how roleplay in TSPRP is done. As stated above, I’m still refining things right now; you’ll probably see a more well-articulated version of this as part of the TSPRParty proposal for MoRP revisions whenever that gets finalized and published.

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