Projects and large-scale investment

Currently right now, countries seem to stabilise budgets and pay off debt they had made since there is currently no motive to send your country into a deficit. Whilst pledges may lead to some parties having to increase spending greatly in a certain category, there is not much incentive to take on extremely demanding pledges that would necessitate a deficit so parties wouldn’t take on pledges that would destroy their budget.

As such I propose a couple things: on the pledges side, the reward for taking on a pledge and completing it should be greater. This can be by increasing the popularity to 10% and increase voter turnout by 10%. Then once they complete the pledge, two things could happen: in the next election voters remember they fulfil the pledge so have a 5% increase in voter turnout and support. If they pledge again, then voters would remember they can fulfil pledges which would increase turnout and support to 20% each. This might be a bit too high, but the aim is to make it really rewarding in the current and upcoming elections for parties to pledge and fulfil voter demand. In addition, if a party has voted against a budget that would deliver the pledge, they could suffer a small malice, either as a general debuff or a debuff when they decide to take on pledges themselves.

I would like for a new thing to be implemented on: projects. Projects could be massive economic investments into the country by the government using tax revenue. However this investment will be expensive that you would have to finance via debt or reserves. An example of this could be in terms of housing: countries could get either demands (like pledges) to invest into housing projects or simply have a situation where housing quality decreases from low housing spending and would have to invest. The success and failure could be similar to voter pledges but also be specifically affecting certain demographics (ie those who value infrastructure investment, or live in social housing) where succeeding grants a bonus popularity, turnout and satisfaction for the governing party while failing would grant debuffs to those demographics (could also influence parties to change the suffrage laws if they upset a demographic too much).

How these projects come about could be through a number of ways: parties could pledge themselves a specific project from a project list, acting as their manifesto in lieu of an actual one. If there have been consistent underfunding of housing, this could set off a bar (or something like that) that would eventually culminate in the housing project to trigger (perhaps through decreasing satisfaction of electors till they demand for it, or like a department or advisor telling you that housing is in need of massive repairs). This may also force parties to increase housing spending or face an even greater investment spending in the future.

As mentioned before, the projects would at first cost a lot of money that you would have to spend your reserves / go into debt. There could be an extra expenditure (like decisions) that would run (ie due to paying for wages, etc) until the project is complete. There could be random events firing during the process that would require more or less additional funding, either eating up more of the budget or reserves.

The costs/duration of the project could be influenced by country laws as well (a country where govt. is the only landlord compared to a country where housing is entirely privatised could suffer from different costs, or different working hours and contract laws could influence the duration of the project). There could also be projects that could promote economic growth in a certain industry rather than just on social matters, allowing government to have another avenue to increase industry growth than just laws.

If the project is due to failing conditions or as a demand, then the government should face a debuff in not addressing it, be rewarded for pledging and delivering it. I haven’t thought what these buffs/debuffs would be so that could be up to discussion, and it would have to take into account the salience of the issue and the trust people have in the government/pledged parties in actually fulfilling it (their votes on budgets, pledges fulfilled).

What I am trying to create is a situation where countries are forced to either spend a lot in their budget, or spend on projects in the future where they would rake up debt. The idea here is trying to replicate the situation governments typically have where they want to spend a lot while having to weigh in on budget surplus. Currently there is very few incentive to spend over surplus, so I hope the projects could help lean some countries towards spending a lot (whether in short term or long term). Of course, if people would like to develop this proposal (since I have just thought of it and didn’t really detail/analyse exactly how it could play it) then you can comment here and hopefully the dev would see it.