| rdfs:comment | - In non-political settings, or anything not based on a real-world government, the local government and how it got its power or where it derives its power tends to be really vague. Sometimes there's a princess or two hanging around since, you know. But generally speaking, all we have to go by is that good rulers are good rulers and bad rulers are bad rulers, without any sort of explanation about how exactly things are run. For tax policy, as an example, at best you might get "good rulers don't tax and evil ones do", without really explaining how anyone funds anything without taxes.
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| abstract | - In non-political settings, or anything not based on a real-world government, the local government and how it got its power or where it derives its power tends to be really vague. Sometimes there's a princess or two hanging around since, you know. But generally speaking, all we have to go by is that good rulers are good rulers and bad rulers are bad rulers, without any sort of explanation about how exactly things are run. For tax policy, as an example, at best you might get "good rulers don't tax and evil ones do", without really explaining how anyone funds anything without taxes. This concept is the Genericist Government. Genericists are government the way people who aren't involved in government see it -- definitely present, but not relevant except in its lowest level of bureaucracy (e.g. the local police and the DMV). They're most common in works of fiction where the main point of the story is the Call to Adventure, so the nature of government and political science isn't all that important to the plot. This trope is a common cause of much Fridge Logic. Not so common in non-fantasy works since those are usually based on real-world governments, instead of whatever we think monarchies used to be like. No Party Given is a related trope when a fictional government is based on the specific government of a specific country, but the specificity stops at the individual politicians' ideological affiliations. Related to Skeleton Government, though a Genericist Government can be of any size. May involve an Evil Chancellor. Subdivides into The Kingdom, The Empire and The Federation. Examples of Genericist Government include:
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