Democracy 3

Democracy 3

Released Oct 2013

Have you ever wanted to be president? or prime-minister? Convinced you could do a better job of running the country? Let's face it, you could hardly do a worse job than our current political leaders.

74% positive · 7,252 reviews
Done
All announced content has been released
High confidence
Done
All announced content has been released
High confidence

Where to buy

Steam $24.99
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Evaluation

Democracy 3 launched on October 14, 2013 and received four paid DLC expansions over roughly three years: Social Engineering (February 6, 2014), Extremism (May 13, 2014), Clones and Drones (October 27, 2014), and Electioneering (July 8, 2016). All four DLC are released with no unreleased entries remaining on the store. The developer also shipped several feature patches and balance updates through 2017, including a unicode/localization overhaul. By September 2020, Positech Games explicitly announced that Democracy 4 was their new focus, noting that "most of the features and policies from all the Democracy 3 expansions are rolled into Democracy 4." This framing treats Democracy 3 as a completed predecessor. The last substantive update to Democracy 3 was the unicode beta in September 2017, and the last developer communication on this game's page dates to October 2020 — which was an announcement about Democracy 4's Early Access launch, not new Democracy 3 content. No unreleased DLC exists, no future content has been announced for Democracy 3, and the developer has moved on to the sequel. The game launched as a full product, received a complete set of expansions, and its content cycle concluded with the final DLC in July 2016.
Evidence
Developer announced Democracy 4 as the successor, explicitly stating that 'most of the features and policies from all the Democracy 3 expansions are rolled into Democracy 4 base game' — framing D3 as a completed chapter.
news post · Sep 3, 2020 source development ending
high
Electioneering DLC released — the fourth and final expansion for Democracy 3, completing the DLC lineup with no unreleased entries remaining.
dlc listing · Jul 8, 2016 source content shipped
high

Content

4 of 4 released · no outstanding content

Media

Details

Developer
Publisher
Positech Games
Achievements
42
Platform
Windows, macOS, Linux
Controller
—
Steam Deck
Unsupported
Players
Single-player

About this game

Have you ever wanted to be president? or prime-minister? Convinced you could do a better job of running the country? Let's face it, you could hardly do a worse job than our current political leaders.

Crime, Unemployment, National Debt, Terrorism, Climate Change...Have you got the answers to the problems that face western industrialized nations? Here is your chance to find out...

An entire virtual country

Democracy 3 simulates the motivations, loyalties and desires of everyone in the country. A custom-designed neural network is used to model individual voters, each which varying memberships of voting groups, political parties and pressure groups. Each voters income is modeled, along with their levels of complacency and cynicism. This is the most sophisticated political strategy game ever created.

Unique user interface

Despite being vastly detailed under-the-hood, Democracy 3 has a unique user interface that makes visualizing the connections between laws, policies, voters and situations easy. A simple iconic-based view of your countries issues allows you to 'drill-down' through all the relationships between policies and voters to quickly analyze the impacts of your decisions. Your trade policy may affect GDP, which will affect unemployment, which will effect poverty, and thus crime, leading to a change in tourism, which affects GDP...

Complex simulated voters

Each individual voter is a mixture of a subset of the 21 different voter groups represented within the game. They might be a young, wealthy, liberal socialist commuter, or a retired conservative religious capitalist, for example. Not only this, but the extent to which they identify each of those groups is both variable, and can be affected by your policies in the long term. Convert your country to religion, or atheism, to capitalism, or socialism by careful and nuanced adjustment of your policies and laws over time. A 'focus group' feature lets you look at individual voters and see exactly how they came to a decision to vote for you (or not!).

Mod Support

Democracy 3 is very configurable and trivial to mod. It also has steam workshop support, for easy installation and browsing of modded content. Want to mod the game yourself? no problem, you need zero coding experience, just a spreadsheet program or a text editor, and we have a full comprehensive modding guide available here:

Modders can easily edit the policies, add new ones, change the way objects affect others, create entirely new countries, situations and even re-write the entire economic and political model. Everything is editable and accessible.

Coded by a single developer

Democracy 3 is the work of a single developer, Cliff Harris from the UK, an indie games veteran who has been making games since 1997 and programming since he was 11 years old. Cliff gets some 'help' from his cats, but frankly not much...
Last evaluated Jun 28, 2026
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