I am playing my first game with Horatio, and have my first election coming up.  The scientist party has been unlocked, so it is between them and the religious party.  The initial projection for the winner put it at 94% scientist and 6% religious. How?  Horatio are supposed to get more points towards religion that science from scientific events.  I have not built any science buildings or specializations.  I have researched down to desert colonization on tier 3 of science, Where most other tech tree segments are still on tier 2.  Also, the minor race growing with me is Z'vali, which are extreme scientist.  There are only 2 units of Z'Vali pop in my empire, and 6 Horatio units.  It doesn't seem like there should be that much support for science vs religion.

Currently, there's next to nothing you can do to promote the religious party. Nothing close to what you can do for other parties. Even if you put all of your systems on producing propaganda for them permanently, they will still fall out of favor.

What's happening in your case is that the scientists party is the first party to unlock for the Horatio due to the Z'vali population, so it's literally the only party with any actions feeding into it. Every system discovered, curiosity probed, and technology and era unlocked goes toward scientists (not to mention all the science buildings), but in order to promote religion, you have to do stuff like build influence buildings (which are far less numerous) or absorb planets via influence (which is a lategame thing). Either adopt the permanent contentedness law to hold onto religion forever, or embrace the inevitable switch to something easy to maintain like scientists or militarism. Those parties have recurring things you can do to keep them popular.

satoru wrote:

Note that the makeup of your senate is built on a persystem population basis

On the per-system basis if you build more buildings of a certain type, then that party gains more influence in that system. If your system is stuffed to the rafters with science buildings then that system will predominantly be represented by the scientist party. Same if you build lots of industry buildings.

Go to your system view, then click the icon beside "System Representiatives"

That shows you the break down of how the senate is represednted by that system, and what events or influences each party has and what events triggered them as well.

It is still really early in the game, first election.  The only system upgrades I have made are the cerebral reality, drone networks, and sustainable farms.  Everything else has been 2-3 colony ships and 1 extra scout ship.  The homewold had Z'Vali on it, but the Horatio still outnumbered them.  I think the poster below you might be rightish.  Explorations could count towards science as well as colonization.  The tech tree being more techs coming faster is probably playing a role as well.  I just wonder if there is a bug somewhere because the election prediction being SO one-sided is really odd.  Even though the prediction was 94 to 6 % in favor of scientists, religious still won the election.