Pusapom

Though not a democracy, the government of Pusapom has many of its features, such as political parties, electoral votes, a legislature, and a system for recalling executives.

Government

Electoral votes

Each of the 60+ states in Pusapom has a specific number of electoral votes, one for each of the legislators who live in the imperial capital of Blop. The people of each state do not choose the legislators; instead each state has its own method to choose them, but all in all they are chosen by the existing government of each state, which may or may not be subsequently responsible to the general public in that state. The name of the legislature is Pistientambum Pum Pupapi, translating roughly to "Legislature of Human Affairs", because even though Pusapom has many sapient animals, those animals do not generally respect the political boundaries humans have set up and cannot be assigned representation in a particular state of the Empire. Instead all interspecies affairs are handled locally. The name of the legislators is žavwub.

There are a few states that are not allowed to participate in this system and have 0 votes; generally this is because they are too politically divided to agree to have a unified opinion, or too small to merit even one representative.

Additionally, foreign nations are represented in the legislature, and their votes are actually more powerful than those of the Poswob legislators. The nokō, an overseer representing the Khulls nations, can overrule any non-unanimous vote, but cannot himself change the vote. This is mathematically equivalent to being able to choose sides in a vote by refusing to pass any legislation until the minority opinion he prefers becomes a majority. Typically, after one round of voting where the nokō rejects the legislation, if the second round returns the same result to him, he will not re-use the veto unless he prefers no action at all.

Most Moonshine states also send voters to Blop, but they send less than one would expect proportionally based on their Moonshine population. These numbers are agreed upon by mutual trust since there is no active census of the Moonshine population.

Also, states outside the Empire which have significant Poswob populations are able to vote; this means that some states actually have two sets of votes, one for the Moonshines and one for the Poswobs of that state.

Structure

The legislature (known as Pistumbum) has several houses. The core house is Labaltam, made up representatives of most of the major Poswob states, with one for each electoral vote of each state. States with zero votes are represented by a nonvoting member called a žamwavža. By tradition, all Labaltam members are female, although in some cases a man may stand. Typically male Labaltantas are not allowed to speak until after all of the female members in his state are done speaking, and their vote may count as more than one female vote. This may seem an exception to the rule that women generally hold most of the power in Pusapom. However, the original reason for this was that men were chosen to represent a group of females who were sworn to agree with each other on all relevant issues in a session and chose to send only one. That is, the only reason for the presence of the man is to be visually distinct from the massive female majority. The man in fact has no opinion of his own, and serves only as a reminder to other members present that he represents more than just the one woman standing beside him telling him what to do. This man is called a kis. There are a few examples of male Labaltantas serving on their own, not representing a group of women, but this is rare, and is considered just a special example of a Kis, a man with only one female representative, where that female representative is not physically present in the room. THis may also happen in the case of a woman who is ill or otherwise unable to serve.

Labaltam typically has about 850 serving members at a time, making it the largest but not the most powerful of the many legislatures.

Political parties

The primary party of the Poswob Empire itself is the United Pacifist League. This party is over 6000 years old, massively older than the Empire itself. Its representation ranges from essentially 100% support in western cities such as Lypelpyp, to 70%-80% in the central rural areas, about 50% in Blop and the eastern third of the empire, and less than 50% around Paba. Note that most of the areas not supporting UPL instead vote for party ideologies that are even more pacifistic than UPL. The only exception to this is the far east, where the climate is too cold to make UPL-style pacifism (not killing land animals even in self defense) realistic.

Note that this does not apply to states outside Pusapom that still vote in the legislature, nor to states such as the Moonshine Crown Territory that are part of the Poswob Empire but do not allow Poswobs to live in them. Here, the UPL often gets no votes at all