Worldbuilding Governments in Fantasy and Sci-Fi

Fantasy and sci-fi love politics. Intrigue and succession and all the rest have become staples of the genres, and that’s great! I love this stuff: I’m a political anorak with an international relations degree, for crying out loud. The question of how we might organise ourselves politically, economically, socially, and so on in different, invented situations is at the core of my interest in these genres.

But, with how prevalent politics has become in these genres, sometimes it falls short of the mark. Mostly commonly, by showing us the thousandth example of a generic monarchy with a good house and an evil house warring over the throne. So, with my experience as a writer and my academic background, I’d like to share my own approach in the hope that it might help other writers in this sphere.

This is planned as the first of two articles. This one will focus on governments, which is to say institutions and structures. In the sequel, I’ll dive more into politics, by which I mean the people, factions, and ideas that populate those institutions.

Now, I’m not going to give you a crash-course political science education. Frankly, modern political science is all but useless in questions of wordbuilding governments for genre fiction. Why? Well, modern political science exists to analyse modern politics and modern governments. The problem with that is almost every modern state either is or claims to be a liberal democracy. That is considered the default and the style of governance than modern political science focuses on studying.

There are a few states that don’t fall into this category, a little more than a dozen all told: communist states or non-constitutional monarchies or confessional republics. Despite these exceptions, modern political science focuses on a very particular kind of governance and so cares a lot about things like the three branches of government or checks and balances. Modern concepts, in other words, developed by the likes of Montesquieu during the Enlightenment.

What we need is a more widely applicable framework for all governments everywhere that we might wish to analyse and worldbuild. And, for this, I’m going to fall back on Rousseau’s model from The Social Contract, modified for our needs.

Rousseau calls the authority of government ‘princely power’ and (book 3, chapter 3) classifies different governments with the question of how many people hold that power. This is, in essence, Rousseau building on Aristotle, and allows him to divide all governments in monarchies (in which one person holds princely power), aristocracies (in which more than one but fewer than half of people do), and democracies (in which over half of the people do). For Rousseau’s purposes, only direct democracies count as a ‘democracy’, whereas our modern representative democracies would be a form of aristocracy, as the majority of citizens are merely private individuals and only a small minority are directly involved in wielding princely power.

This is a useful start, but what Rousseau then further asks is how these people got their power. Though he looks mostly at inheritance and election, we could also think about other appointment mechanisms — even to being chosen by lot. Whatever the mechanism, governments can then be further divided along these lines. So, a representative democracy can, under this framework, be identified as an elective aristocracy: a system in which a group of people are elected to the position of holding princely power. Ancien régime France was a hereditary monarchy, whereas Poland under the Golden Liberty was an elective one.

This is a useful beginning, and creates a framework that is flexible enough to be widely applicable. First, we ask who holds power. Then, we ask how they attain that power.

But there’s something else: a crucial fact about all governments everywhere, which is that they are made up of more than merely one institution. No individual and no institution governs alone. Instead, all governments are made up of a network of institutions sharing power, sometimes working together and sometimes at odds. To quote Rousseau: ‘Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as a simple form of government. A single leader must have subordinate magistrates; a government of the people must have a leader.’ This will inevitably lead to a mixing of these different structures and it’s here that governmental worldbuilding can get really interesting.

To look back at ancien régime — pre-revolutionary — France, for example, we see much more than merely a hereditary king. Royal ministers and the bureaucracy that supported them held some independent power along the lines of an appointed aristocracy. The parlements, whose members were hereditary aristocrats (though new ones could be appointed by the king) were courts with some legislative authority. Local royal governors called intendants, who at the provincial level acted as appointed monarchs. The conflicts of these institutions are at the heart of the early French Revolution, but that nuance is lost if we merely look at the institution that technically holds the highest sovereign authority.

Analysing our own liberal democracies under this system, we have elected aristocracies that make up our legislative branches. Appointed aristocrats form the judiciary and bureaucracy. In parliamentary systems, the executive is an aristocracy appointed by the legislative. In presidential ones, it’s an elected monarchy. And these structures are often replicated again at a more local level, creating the federalism of states like the US, Germany, and India, or the asymmetric devolution we see in the UK and Spain. On top of all that, we sometimes use referenda, which are a form of direct democracy.

Or, to turn back to genre fiction, we have Dune’s system. Before Paul takes control, princely power in the galaxy is split largely between the Padishah Emperor, the Landsraad, and CHOAM. The Padishah Emperor is a hereditary monarch. The Landsraad is a hereditary aristocracy made up of the heads of the great and minor houses. CHOAM is a publicly traded company with a state-backed monopoly on trade, functioning like a plutocratic (rule by wealth) aristocracy in which the shareholders are those same heads of the great and minor houses, along with the emperor.

What Dune does so well is — amongst other things — show how these institutions evolved through particular groups attaining power, after which their power became institutionalised. The Landsraad wasn’t invented because the emperors just thought it was such a good idea, it was invented to regulate the interactions between the emperor and the already powerful houses — powerful through their control of planets and nuclear weapons and shares in CHOAM. This is similar to how parliaments were created in feudal European societies, to represent the already existing power of the nobility (who controlled land and military force), the church (which controlled land and held spiritual authority), and the wealthier inhabitants of cities, like merchants and guild masters (who controlled trade and what passed for industry).

If we take a broader view of ‘government’ — not merely looking at the formal government but at other institutions that regulate the political, economic, and social system — we would also have to contend with the Spacing Guild and Bene Gesserit. These powerful factions can influence the government’s institutions but are also influenced by it and, just like with the houses, we can see where their power comes from. (Namely, the Spacing Guild’s monopoly on space travel and the Bene Gesserit’s combination of religious authority, extreme mastery of human capabilities, and self-perpetuating influence in every other power centre in the galaxy.)

We’ll discuss this more in the article on politics and factions and people and so on, but it’s important to note for worldbuilding governments how government institutions are often merely reflective of already existing power. No governments ever really form ex-nihilo from the forehead of The Legislator (the term Rousseau uses for precisely this kind of guy, the Solons and James Madisons of the world), but instead builds on what came before it and changes to accommodate new centres of power. When a government refuses to do so, the disenfranchised group will often wield that power to force their way in.

So, to understand what kind of government institutions might emerge in the society you are worldbuilding, you’ll first have to understand where underlying power lies in that society. That means understanding what that power is — either harder power land or money or soldiers or a particular resource or magic, or softer more charismatic or ideological influence — and who holds it. (And even how firm their grasp on it is.) Once you know that, you’ll be able to think about what institutions might be created to represent them.

Otherwise, they they might coopt existing institutions to do the same. A mostly elective government in a society with a strong plutocratic element might see, to use an entirely random example, a heavy influx of money into the democratic process in an attempt to coopt it into representing the interests of the plutocrats. In ancien régime France, to use a similar idea, the newly wealthy would buy their way into the aristocracy to coopt the institutions that had already been created to represent that previously powerful section of society and take advantage of the special status they had carved out for themselves.

New institutions are not always created to include a powerful group into government, but sometimes instead because the existing institutions see an advantage to creating them. Local governors or local autonomy, for example, will always emerge in states that lack fast communication, merely because it’s unfeasible to directly govern that which you cannot directly communicate with. This is true both in the pre-modern societies of fantasy (where a horse might be the fastest means of transport1) and of far-future sci-fi empires (limited in communications by the speed of light), though of course writers can always create their own fantasy/sci-fi reasons why faster communication is possible, which would therefore radically change the structure of the government. New institutions might otherwise be created to lighten the administrative load on existing ones (particularly when the government is expanding in scope) or as part of the power-jostling of those existing institutions. (Maybe the king creates a new council to undermine the power of the old one he’s in conflict with.)

Once you know what these institutions are, who’s in them, how people attain power within them, and how and why they emerged, the final question is to ask what discrete powers they have. Again, the most common model today to understand that question is the three-branches system — one institution to make laws, another to carry them out, and a final one to interpret them. This might be a useful framework to your worldbuilding, but historically it’s not particularly common and therefore isn’t something you should limit yourself to.

Instead, an institutions power might be limited to a particular area or group of people — like the Ottoman millet system, which allowed religious minorities to be governed by their own laws. It might have power only over specified areas of policy. It might have the power to govern, or it might merely exist as a chamber of discussion and scrutiny, perhaps with some veto power over other institutions. Its powers might be a combination of various things, all grafted together.

The hidden ingredient in all of this is, as stated earlier, that governments evolve. They’re never static; always changing as the society they govern does. This means that you won’t only have to think about the groups that are currently powerful and the institutions it currently makes sense to create, but about all those that used to be powerful and have already been created, which might cling onto that role in government long after their power has waned. The British House of Lords, for example, gave a seat to all hereditary peers until 1999, and allowed 92 of them to keep their seats until this very year, long after the power of the hereditary peerage faded.

Considering all of this, you’ll be able to create an intricate network of institutions interacting with, and indeed against, each other, forming an interesting and layered governmental system: the perfect backdrop to some good old political intrigue. Indeed, these institutions themselves, and their tensions in particular, might help inform your intrigue and add to your plot.

Two final pieces of advice. First, the best way to really understand how to craft a government is to learn about modern and historical ones, and think about how those systems might have to change to fit your world. In all worldbuilding, my ultimate advice is to pick up a history book and just get immersed in how fascinating and complex humans and the things we create are.

But second, don’t catch worldbuilder’s disease. If your world doesn’t need complicated, multi-layered governments — if your plot has nothing to do with them — then there’s no need to waste hours crafting them. Worldbuilding for its own sake is fun (or, at least, I think so) but if you’re just trying to create what you need to tell your story, which is usually the better advice, then your time might be better spent elsewhere. A generic monarchy might work just fine for you and, if kept semi-vague with perhaps a few references to other institutions you know nothing about except their name, the reader might even fill in the gaps and assume you have some big complicated system just out of sight. We’ve all got to take that approach with some of our worldbuilding — we can’t know the name of every village in every country in the world — and it’s absolutely fine if this is where you want to take that approach in your story that ultimately has nothing to do with politics anyway.

Yet, for me personally, governments are one of my favourite parts of worldbuilding. My own worldbuilding disease is terminal and — oh no! — it looks like it’s contagious. So get out there, have fun with it, and create something unique for your characters to explore.

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Thank you for reading. I made most of these points in an earlier essay on the topic on my website, but decided that needed to be re-written and expanded for substack, which is what you’ve just read. I really hope these questions and ideas help you.

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In two weeks, I’ll be releasing my next short story, which should finally be Fortune’s Favour which I failed to finish for my previous slot but is pitched as a cat-and-mouse chase on the high seas. We’re following the mice as they use every trick in the book to evade their pursuers. Two weeks after that will be my next non-fiction which, excitingly, will be a discussion of my return to the query trenches.