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 noko, 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.

As there are many other sapient species living in Pusapom besides humans, the human population is not always represented well. For example, in the state of Ramma, almost all humans were eaten by wildcats and birds of prey around the year 7700. These animals also preyed on rabbits, but the rabbits were hardier and eventually built settlements strong enough to keep out the wildcats and added tunnels to make it easy to hide from eagles etc. Humans live in these settlements too, but are subjects to the rabbits and thereefore are not actually citizens of Pusapom since the rabbit nation (aslo called Ramma) is not in Pusapoms' control. The representatives of Ramma know these humans exist, but cannot count them in a census and therefore get no additional representation.

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.

States

For a long time, Pusapom had had about 25 states. In the 7700's, many of the states split apart into other states, and as of the year 8743 there are exactly 100 states in Pusapom.

Papsosa

This is the territory of the capital, almost completely occupied by the one city, Blop. Everything is unique here, not just in the empire, buti in the world.

Nama

A very old state unloike all iotghers. Humans here are so weak that one person can swoop in and terrorize the entire city,. e.g. as if the Beltway Snipers were just living in plain sight at the edge of town but no one could stop them, and they didnt even need guns.

Lušatšam

A very cold state in the northeast corner. It is mostly unvegetated icecap, but has cities such as Wabbubo and Tarpos that are crucial routes across the mouintains. THe mtns are actually warmer than the lowlajnds, and the coast warmer than inland even in summer. Heavy snow is persistent throughout the summer, such that people cannot build normal houses or they would be buried. Moreover, temperastures do peep above freezing from time to time, and though usually the snow is too cold to melt even then, it makes the surface slippery enough that icebergs detach from the main icecap and slipslide their way to the sea. Thus people often live on cliffs overlooking the areas where snow tends to pile ip.In winter, although it is much colder and is very windy, there is not much snow,m and conditions are actually a bit more conducive to outdoors expectivity.

Lapel

This is the state where most Pabaps live. Pabap society is traditionally divided into genities (lisa). For the most part, a person cannot marry outside their genity. The different genities of Pabap society are as follows:

White The ruling class. Like all others, they are expected to do manual labor to support themselves, but they are free from having to serve others as a job. They are the ones who make the laws of Paba and any territory associated with it. They are allowed to marry inside their caste, and are expexcted to. So this group has become largelyt inbred. Over thousands of years, they outbred the other groups and became almost the entire population of Paba. This made Paba very wealthy, but at the same time it was very dependent on surrounding areas for basic necessities such as food.

Purple The military. The color comes from the grapes grown in the area around Pabap and the idea that they were protecting the grape vineyards from intruders, rather than the people, who were expected to hide out in deserted areas if necessary. As Paba is now a pacifist society the soldiers have been disarmed and now serve their purpose only by staying up at night looking for intruders.

Orange This is a rare example of a caste color name being used to describe the color of skin rather than clothing. Oranges traditionally were tall dark-skinned people who lived along the immediate coast, ate mostly fish, and sold what they could not eat to non-fishermen. They still survive, but have become almost indstinguishable from the pink-skinned Pabaps around them because of the great difference in population size.

Green Outsiders such as Poswobs who are part of the society but outside the other caste groups. Anyone who has married Green becaomes Green. This is the only genity with this porperty; thus Green is slowly gaining at the expense of all the other groups. Green is associated mostly with Poswobs, who broke off from the Pabaps around 2800 years ago (formally declaring independence in the year 5547), but the Green caste predates this split by thousands of years and there are a lot of Greens in the southern Empire who have no Poswob ancestry. However, over the years many communities of Greens in the Pabap Empire have switched en masse to being Poswobs.

Black Not an actual color term, this is used for foreigners who are completely outside the genity system. Not a synonym for green because anyone marrying a black becomes green, not black.

Terminology

• Pupompom ("kissed land") refers to the northern states, essentially all of the empire outside of Pabap territory. It includes Nama.
• Pablwempum refers to the southern states, although they are sometimes also referred to by their aboriginal name Ler. The word Pablwempum is a loanword from Pabappa padempim, which means "the team". It is in turn an abbreivation of Pabi Padempim.