Political parties

Parties are the central political structures of A House Divided. Everything meaningful, including elections, legislation, coalitions, and parliament formations, flows through party membership. If you want to do more than run as an independent, you need a party.

What a party is

A political party is a country-scoped organization with its own name, abbreviation, color, treasury, and ideology position on a two-axis grid (economic left-right, social liberal-conservative). Parties hold seats, run candidates in primaries, and accumulate resources that leaders can spend on collective actions.

Each party also has a per-state footprint: state party organizations track regional membership, organization score, treasury, and leadership separately from the national party. What happens in Texas Democratic circles is distinct from what happens nationally.

The two-axis ideology system

Party ideology lives on two axes:

The party's official position on these axes directly affects:

• Which NPPs align with the party (ideology proximity)
• Which voter demographics the party appeals to
• How your character's primary score is calculated (party alignment component)

Party IDs and URLs

Each party has a short ID number used in its URL, like /parties/1?country=US. This ID is only unique within a country. The US Democratic Party and the UK Labour Party might both be party number 1, so country context is always required when looking up a party.

URLs always include a country parameter: /parties?country=UK lists UK parties, and party links always carry the country flag.

Party pages

Navigate to /parties and select a country to browse all parties. Each party page shows:

• Overview: ideology position, seat counts by office type, member roster
• Leadership: current chair, vice chair, and treasurer with their term status
• Organization: per-state org scores and budget allocations
• Treasury: national treasury balance and tax rate settings

Built-in vs. custom parties

Built-in parties (Democrat, Republican, Labour, Conservative, and their equivalents by country) are pre-configured with party colors, historical positions, and seeded membership. They cannot be deleted, and they don't go through the charter system.

Custom parties are created via a Party Charter, a founding agreement signed by 3 human founders. One player drafts the charter (party name, abbreviation, four-axis platform, and the three founders), and the party only materializes once all three founders have co-signed. The two co-founders must live in the proposer's home state or a state adjacent to it, and any replacement founder must satisfy the same rule relative to the anchor founder. Any founder can reject during the signing window, which opens a founder-replacement window with the same deadline: whichever is longer of 14 turns or 72 real-world hours. Custom parties that go empty (no members, no seats) are otherwise deleted automatically, but a party with a ratified charter is exempt from cleanup until the charter is dissolved.

Existing pre-Phase-6 third parties were migrated to the charter system in place: each was given an automatically generated charter, marked incomplete if fewer than three human officers were available at the time. Incomplete migrated parties keep their cleanup immunity; the remaining founder slots can be filled later from the charter detail page to fully ratify.

Parties by country

Each country has its own set of default parties suited to its political system:

Related

• Party Membership: How to join, switch, and what membership unlocks.
• Party Leadership: Chair, vice chair, treasurer roles and elections.
• Party Organization: The org score system, how it builds and decays.
• Party Ideology: The two-axis ideology grid and its effects.
• Party Actions: What leaders can spend party resources on.
• Coalitions: Cross-party alliances and their effects.