I have as as summary from an article by Marc Miller as published in High
Passage issue 5, titled Governments in Traveller which explains the reasoning
behind the government codes:

The original reason for these classifications is to better describe the
characters interactions with the world governments. They do not deal with kings
or presidents or heads of state; they deal with individual members of broad
government mechanisms; they deal with office holders and employees whose
attitudes and actions are shaped by the type of government they serve. As a
result, travellers are rarely interested in the upper reaches of government;
they want to know what they can expect from the governmental structure at their
own level.

	If you want a more political science type list of governments, I recommend the
list provided by GURPS Space 3rd edition, and as copied into GURPS Traveller
Core rules, and expounded upon in GT:First In.

	I have a set of house rules for T5 to expand the description of the government,
including details of their inner workings. Which I should publish as some point.
It's about 6 pages, I wonder if Jeff would be interested.

On 8/29/2020 10:48 PM, David Johnson wrote:
> Tom Barclay wrote:
>
>>     The shortcomings in the "Book 3" UWP system aren't so much a product of
>>     their simple, "paper and pencils" mechanics as they are the artifacts or
>>     remnants of designers who seemed to know a lot more about--or to be more
>>     interested in--ironmongery than, say, political science. . . .
>>
>>
>> I don't quite think that's 100% true. Marc has had quite an interest in
>> history which itself requires an awareness of politics and political 'science'
>> (sorry, falls right in there with some other fuzzy so-called sciences).
>
> [Here's a separate response on these points.]
>
> Obviously, I'm not able to comment on Marc's understanding of political science
> back in 1977--or that of any of the other Founders--but I will note here the
> intrusion of your own subjective view which seems quite skeptical of  . . .
> "concreteness," shall we say, in the analysis of political systems. So let's
> keep that apparent bias of yours in mind in this discussion.
>
>> I think the fact is the goal was to create some planets so they could play a
>> game that involved (from what we see in adventures and magazines) : crime,
>> scams, robbery, heists, blackmail, mercenary tickets, smuggling, solving
>> mysteries, and some economic mini-games (trade, belting, etc). The focus was
>> building planets so you could cycle from one to the other fast (versus going
>> for depth).
>
> Again, I'm not able to guess at anyone's intentions but we can look at what they
> created. A numerical value for "Government" which was generated by a 2D throw
> (with -7 DM) and modified by the Population value as a positive DM. Thus, we get
> that more populous worlds will tend to have a higher Government value as our
> only conceptual guidance. So here's the list:
>
> 0 No government structure.
> 1 Company/Corporation.
> 2 Participating Democracy.
> 3 Self-Perpetuating Oligarchy.
> 4 Representative Democracy.
> 5 Feudal Technocracy.
> 6 Captive Government.
> 7 Balkanization.
> 8 Civil Service Bureaucracy.
> 9 Impersonal Bureaucracy.
> A Charismatic Dictator.
> B Non-Charismatic Leader.
> C Charismatic Oligarchy.
> D Religious Dictatorship.
>
> Now the first few seem to make a sort of simplistic sense. "No government" fits
> with a small populace if for no other reason than that as soon as two or three
> folks start "cooperating" in some manner vis-a-vis the other folks you have
> ~some~ sort of "government."
>
> We can argue about what "company/corporation" governance looks like but this
> really makes no sense because any "corporation" is simply a legal and
> administrative ~creation~ of some ~other~ government! (In the Imperium campaign
> this "other government" must be the Imperium and therefore it's a world ruled by
> the Imperium!) This has been commonly interpreted to mean a world ruled by an
> off-world corporation but isn't that simply a particular instance of "captive
> government"? We're only at No. 1. . . .
>
> Participating democracy--as in "demarchy" where everyone gets a direct say in
> governance--fits well with a small populace but if we consider some commonly
> understood examples of this--ancient Greece (or the ~antebellum~ U.S. where
> black folks, brown folks, Indigenous folks and white women had no vote)--we
> realize immediately that these are examples of a much larger society where
> ~most~ of the folks didn't have much say in governance. Ancient Greece--and
> ~antebellum~ America--was actually more of a "self-perpetuating oligarchy" in
> which the oligarchs practiced "participating democracy" amongst themselves. So,
> perhaps this type ~isn't~ particularly tied to a small populace. . . .
>
> Next is self-participating oligarchy and now I'm thoroughly confused. Why would
> this type tend to have more populace than a "participating democracy"? We're at
> No. 4. . . .
>
> I'm not going to talk about what a "feudal technocracy" is. (There are thousands
> of words about it--to a mostly inconclusive end--in the old TML archives. In
> hindsight, I'm convinced this was just a placeholder to enable H. Beam Piper's
> Sword-Worlds to make an appearance.) Perhaps it's sort of "in the middle" from a
> population standpoint because "feudal" tends to make us think of small groups
> while "technocracy" seems like it ought to be a lot of folks. Regardless, no one
> ever ran across this type of government in a political science course. . . .
>
> Next is captive government. Is this like the old Ukrainian Soviet Socialist
> Republic? Pre-revolutionary America (or post-revolutionary British North
> America)? Vichy France? Imperial Japan under post-war U.S. occupation? A League
> of Nations mandate or a UN trust territory? The Dutch East Indies Company? The
> Hudson Bay Company in Rupert's Land? It might be all of those and yet we still
> know nothing about the actual ~governance~ within this captive system. Mostly,
> it's "in the middle" too because there has to be a "larger polity" to be the
> "captor" while there have to be enough folks for there to be some sort of
> "government" which has been "captured." Again, not something you're ever going
> to find as a type of government on a political science syllabus.
>
> Balkanization--now there's a "1970s" (or 1920s) term! You've already pointed out
> the difficulties here so let's just note what else ~Book 3~ told us about this:
> "the referee should generate the specific qualities of each territory on the
> planet separately." Why this one is smack dab in the middle of the
> population-modified scale is beyond me. . . .
>
> Then come the bureaucracies--again, not a term you will find being used to
> describe a government type in a political science text. Just about ~all~
> governments have a "bureaucracy" of some sort, whether it be small town or the
> European Union or the Population Level "A" People's Republic of China. Why an
> "impersonal" bureaucracy would tend to be more populous than a "civil service"
> bureaucracy is another mystery. (Notice the tendency though with democracy and
> bureaucracy--and coming for dictatorship--for the "less attractive" version to
> be the more populous polity or "larger" government.)
>
> Then come the "dictatorships" which are described ~specifically~ on the basis of
> the personalities of the incumbent. That seems reasonable though it's been a
> rare dictator who has managed to govern a large populace ~without~ a whole lot
> of ~bureaucracy~. Now imagine your favourite (or least favourite, I guess)
> dictatorship. Why would the leader who follows a "charismatic" dictator--Maduro
> after Chavez, say, or Mubarak after Sadat--slightly tend to rule a more populous
> polity? Here is more of the implied "smaller" equals "better" American
> "small-government" ideology.
>
> Next is charismatic oligarchy. Is this Arthurian England under the Knights of
> the Round Table? The U.S. under FDR's Democrats? Gaullist France? Yeltsin's
> Russia? Toussaint's Haiti? The Mamluk Sultanate? Google? I have no idea. Nor do
> I understand why such a government would tend to be more populace than a
> dictatorship or a bureaucracy. . . .
>
> Finally, there is religious dictatorship, at the top of the list, making it
> possible only on the most populous worlds. Can we look around today among the
> most populous states and find a "religious dictatorship"? Iran ranks eighteenth
> in population (twenty-four back in 1979). It seems like the last time we've seen
> a government like this it would have been the Abbasid Caliphate or the Byzantine
> Empire. Both are dwarfed in size by the modern world's most populous states.
> (Canada has twice the population of the Abbasid Caliphate.)
>
> This is a system of categorization that can best be described as "eclectic." The
> categorization itself, with a tendency toward higher populations at the higher
> government types and smaller populations at the lower types is largely arbitrary
> (and perhaps ideological itself). "More detail," used simply to expand upon
> these fourteen options, will not bring much clarity or consistency. It's long
> been understood that most of these government types can also be described by one
> of the other types. A "company / corporate" government might be a "charismatic
> dictatorship"--perhaps Apple under Jobs or Disney under Walt--or an "impersonal
> bureaucracy--like your least favourite telecoms provider. A "charismatic
> dictatorship" might be a "self-perpetuating oligarchy" or perhaps a "civil
> service bureaucracy." It wanders on and on and on (or around and around and around).
>
> There's nothing "time bound" about the shortcomings here. The government type
> system is a hodgepodge of layperson understandings of government types (the
> "oligarchies" and "democracies" and "dictatorships"), efforts to kluge in
> campaign elements ("company / corporate" and "captive" and, perhaps, even
> "feudal technocracy"), and stereotypical American small-government
> libertarianism (why the "ugly" government types tend to congregate at the higher
> population end of the scale--and why Government code is a +DM for law level,
> which is focused entirely on gun controls). An automation-enabled "deep dive"
> into the details of "religious dictatorship" or "participating democracy" or,
> for heaven's sake, "balkanization" isn't going to fix any of this. The
> shortcomings here are conceptual.
>
> When I was in graduate school there was an annual debate between a professor and
> a grad student on the premise of whether or not political science was "science."
> I always found it sort of silly and wondered why (American) political scientists
> found that sort of question to be so important. (I think the answer has
> something to do with ~their~ professors' experience of McCarthyism, but that's a
> whole other story.) The fact remains that the "study of politics" isn't "fuzzy"
> or "soft" even if it can't test its hypotheses any better than an evolutionary
> biologist or archaeologist or astronomer can. Someone with an understanding of
> political science that was as robust as was the understanding of Traveller's
> Founders about ironmongery and small unit tactics would have created something
> rather different from what we see for government types in ~Book 3~ (and in the
> ~MegaTraveller Referee's Manual~).
>
> Cheers,
>
> David
> --
> "Well, we don't use the word government very much. We talk a lot about authority
> and sovereignty, and I'm afraid we burn entirely too much powder over it, but
> government always seems to us like sovereignty interfering in matters that don't
> concern it. As long as sovereignty maintains a reasonable semblance of good
> public order and makes the more serious forms of crime fairly hazardous for the
> criminals, we're satisfied." - Lucas Trask (H. Beam Piper), ~Space Viking~
>
>
>
>
> -----
> The Traveller Mailing List
> Archives at http://archives.simplelists.com/tml
> Report problems to xxxxxx@simplelists.com
> To unsubscribe from this list please go to
> http://www.simplelists.com/confirm.php?u=QWmJ5KKpHa3MBU63jjs3knG6o9jLMkSu
>

--
         Thomas Jones-Low
Work:	xxxxxx@softstart.com
Home:   xxxxxx@gmail.com