Today I am going to discuss the other elements important to the composition of your country and your stability economy, Factions and Culture.
Factions
Factions are governed by loyalty and power. A loyal faction grants bonuses, while a disloyal faction takes them away. Most factions at any given time are neutral towards you, but it is easy to woo one faction to your side, at the expense of the loyalty of many others. For this reason, it is impossible to obtain loyalty from all of your factions, so the game becomes to empower loyal factions and marginalize the others.
To this effect, privileges are able to both increase the loyalty and power of a single faction at the cost, generally, of the loyalty and power of another. In addition, they grant bonuses that improve your country and incentivize a certain playstyle, depending on your alignment.
Laborer faction privileges and effects.
Each faction also has a maximum number of privileges determined by your reforms. This limits the amount of bonuses you can stack from each faction, and also determines the relative worth of each faction to your cause.
There is also the ruling coalition, whose size is determined by the form of your government. Ruling factions are generally more loyal and powerful, but their influence on the cost of reforms is much more significant. Ruling factions can drastically increase the cost of reforms they disagree with, or make them cheaper otherwise, so pick them wisely.
But from where does a faction draw its power? Faction power is gained from multiple places, including modifiers, population, and controlled regions and units. Each of these factors in to the total calculation, and then each faction is allocated a percentage of the total power based on their share (the total power of all factions is always 100%).
From the population, factions derive power from specific population types and demographics. Soldiers, for example, are loyal to the military faction, whereas engineers are of the middle class. As you have significant influence over the general demographic makeup of your country, you can influence the power distribution of your politics by building different projects in order to obtain political power for certain factions you agree with.
This also means that each type of country will have a different attitude towards each element of its population. As a general rule, the productive element of the population (laborers and middle class), who provide the industrial capacity necessary for the production of resources, are loyal to factions who fall in the blue part of the alignment circle. Countries following the green, orange, red, or purple paths must therefore be more cautious about the influence of these populations, and therefore correct by spending stability resources on suppressing them, or modifying their political power through reforms and faction privileges.
Culture
Culture provides some important and hard to come by bonuses to your country that are somewhat unique to you. Each culture in the world has 3 traits and all are different from each other in at least one way. Your primary culture determines which culture's bonuses you obtain, but your country can have many accepted cultures which allows you to efficiently administer the territories that culture inhabits.
Culture trait screen, yellow halo indicates this trait is possessed by the current culture.
Traits are organized into rings, with the innermost ring being the "religion" the culture is based on. Religion is in quotation marks because that does not mean that everyone in the culture follows that religion, it merely indicates the closest match for the overall value system the culture utilizes - most of which come from religions. You will notice however some of the traits in this category are not religions, at least by the usual definition. Marxism, occultism, etc. are represented as religions in this context because they are wide reaching value systems which are mutually exclusive with others.
The outer two rings are miscellaneous traits which each give some interesting bonuses. While it is not impossible to switch your primary culture, it is difficult, and therefore you can think of culture as being kind of a country specific buff that you carry for the entire game. Ideally, every culture has some kind of trait synergy that makes that culture unique and interesting to play.
Overall, the idea behind the stability economy is to provide you with a limited resource you can use for the advancement of your country, and therefore is the most important resource in the game. Next time, I will illustrate one of the ways that you can spend stability to grow your civilization: War and Peace. That will not be next week though, as I have other things to do that weekend.