Appendix A: Populism
One of the most common questions in the forums is: how do you deal with populists? Most people start to get concerned about the populist faction when they have 50% or more Senate influence, but some people have reported a populist faction with 90% influence or more!
First, it's important to note the distinction between the populists in the Senate and populist characters. There is no direct link between characters and the senate. Having characters in office might increase a faction's political attraction, and having a strong faction might influence some events that affect characters, but by and large you should think of them as being entirely different mechanics.
Populist Characters
Characters have "conviction" towards each of the political factions. Conviction is measured as a numerical value: the highest of these values determines which faction a character will join. You can see this number by checking the tooltip for the character's portrait. This is a picture from earlier in this guide:
You can see the conviction in parentheses just after the words "Military Faction". His other convictions are deliberately hidden to keep the player guessing, but I find that if a character has less than 15-20 conviction for a specific faction then he is still pretty easily converted to another faction.
Now, how to convert a character to another faction? The easiest way to do this is to give him the jobs that he desires. If a character has an objective, achieving that objective usually gives him conviction towards a specific faction. For example, a character wanting to be a general will gain Military conviction if he gets that job; as such, I find it helpful to have a "spare" army for just such characters (which is, incidentally, very handy for taking out revolts).
If a character has an objective to gain a title and doesn't have any titles at all, he'll automatically gain populist conviction at a rate of 0.1 per month. This means that after a couple of years, he'll likely join the populist faction, which you'll usually want to avoid. There are also some events that may increase a character's populist conviction. If he's an important character, chances are you'll want to avoid these.
Populist Senate
In the senate, there are factors that contribute to each faction's "attraction". Attraction is a percentage value that shows how much that faction will grow in the following months. The faction with the highest attraction will gain senators in the following months, while the other factions will lose senators.
Note that the 2.3 beta patch has changed a number of these attraction factors (and has thankfully opened them up for modding!), so I won't go into great detail about them, while the main factors are already explained in the main guide. The first thing you'll need to do is simply remove any populists from public office.
The populist faction leader's Charisma value has a higher impact on his faction's attraction value than any other. Other factions gain a bonus equal to (charisma -1)*1, populists instead get a bonus equal to (charisma -1)*4. So, a Military leader with 5 Charisma would only give a bonus of 4%, while a Populist leader with 5 Charisma would give a bonus of 16%. As a general rule of thumb, I like to avoid having populist leaders with a Charisma level greater than 4. Just imprison any populist leader who is too influential, it's far safer than trying to assassinate them (less of a Tyranny penalty).
Now, there may come a time when you simply cannot control your populist senate. You may have neglected to check the screen for a few years during an intense war, or you may not have known how to do it. Either way, there are two ways to get rid of the populists. The slow way involves the same principles as above. The quick way involves allowing a Populist Civil War, which may weaken your state considerably but will re-balance your senate immediately. It's up to you which way you want to go.
To trigger a populist civil war, the populists need to have a majority control of the senate, but your consul needs to be a non-populist. Note that a regular civil war will not balance the senate. The stronger the populists are, the more likely it is that a civil war will start.
Once you've won the civil war, you can then follow the normal anti-populist measures mentioned above and you shouldn't have a problem with them again.
