OK, so your story involves an anarcho-syndicalist commune. You still have to explain to readers what exactly that entails or means for your characters. Or you can make something up, but you still need to be able to explain to a reader what exactly a syndic does in your government.
So, one way to go is to do a very broad sketch and then ignore it if you don’t need it. So your village is harassed by a dragon, and the local noble can’t help because the king called him away to deal with an enemy army. The history and precise organization of the monarchy is not important to the story, so you mention it as far as why “We need to find a hero, a solution, or yes,” is the decision of the village council.
If it is a colony world, or you are painting color with world-building, mentioning a founder and his/her/its role can help with that. “No, you cannot go to the park that day, because it is Founders’ Day Eve, and everyone will be setting up for the ceremonies and community meal, remember?” Then you have the ceremonies, and the protagonist is bored, until he notices an attractive young thing who is fascinated by the history of the Founding, and decides to chat her up after the official events wrap up. If he can find her in the crowd. Or you might mention that the city was founded by a noble, but after a series of injustices (or the noble got crosswise with someone bigger, stronger, and meaner or sneakier), the city bought its freedom and now answers only to the Emperor, or to [$DEITY$]. You hint at Big Picture, but keep things local per the story’s needs.
You notice that there’s a lot of short hand built into what I described above. Readers will fill things in, unless you are introducing something very new and/or alien. If your “king” is not something like a Henry VII or Francis I, and your emperor varies from the better known historical stand-bys (Charles V, Hirohito, Mehmed the Conqueror, Yongle, et cetera), your reader needs some details and reminders. I played with this in the Cat Among Dragons, because the “dragons,” the Azdhagi, are a pack-based feudal meritocracy, with the (literally) biggest, meanest, smartest noble becoming king-emperor. He is the king of Drakon IV, emperor of two other worlds and a handful of moons. And the Pack can override and even execute him if he goes too far, something that happens rarely but is very, very memorable and dramatic when it does kick in.
All this means that you know how your character relates to the government at various levels, and vice versa. It might be a tiny hamlet with a tradition of “G-d bless the king and keep him (far away from us),” until the royal recruiters show up with clubs and a quota. Or your character is a by-the-book bureaucrat who absolutely cannot imagine a colony not obtaining approvals in triplicate for changes to the Official Plan, even if it takes three light-years of travel to get word back to the home office, and at least two years, plus travel, to get an answer. He is part of the government, and is shocked and dismayed to see the terrible things that happened when the Official Plan was set aside! (See Keith Laumer’s Retief stories for the mindset, or visit your local permitting office.) Conversely, your MC might be a trapper, or asteroid miner, or someone so far out of the loop that she’s forgotten about the loop, and it has forgotten her.
Which brings us to the question of scale. The local village or tribal council will have different interests and emphases than a regional authority, or national, or planetary, or interstellar. In most cases, local and regional are the levels where your characters will meet allies, antagonists, helps, hinderances, and your world’s version of red tape and traditional duties and customs. If you write planetary romance, space opera, or your characters are political players of some kind, then you need to be ready to keep things consistent and steady at a larger scale, and can ignore the local news unless it is germane, or adds a bit of world-building color.
Government also includes economy, to an extent. Unless you are writing a series of stories about a middle-aged merchant or someone who runs a business, fine details of the regional economy are probably not wildly important. Or if you are Dave Freer. 😉
Mad Genius Club 
8 responses to “But What Does it Do?: Fictional Government Building”
This is yet another reason to attend your municipal meetings!
They provide great insight into normal, decent people who want wildly opposed things: i.e., the taxpayer supported Taj Mahal of swimming pools surrounded by the even bigger grand Community center of our dreams vs. the people who say I don’t want to pay for something I’ll never use and I don’t care that we can recoup some costs by renting out the Olympic pool to visiting swim teams.
Watching people argue about “what is a trolley” can be educational and amusing.
There’s no conflict like small town conflict and then you have to deal with the bigger bosses down the road: the county, the state, and the Feds.
You may also have, like us in Hershey, “The Entities.” Yes, that’s what they’re called. They are Hershey Corporation, Hershey Entertainment and Resorts, and The Milton Hershey Trust aka as “The Trust.” Drive around the township and if you don’t know, for sure, who owns a piece of property, guess one of the entities and you probably won’t be wrong, considering that the entities between them own between 1/3 and 1/2 of the township. Accounts vary.
They must also be considered with every decision.
Just like your magical kingdom!
The town that is brown.
At least when my father visited, he didn’t remember anything that wasn’t brown.
There is plenty that isn’t brown! We have orange too. And green. Lots of green.
Actually, a Tru By Hilton was recently built and one of our town powers got Hilton to change their garish red/yellow/blue primary color scheme for a more tasteful and in line with Hershey’s colors. They ended up with various shades of chocolate and peanut butter. It’s much better looking than the usual Tru.
Project Milton, our newest chocolate factory is mainly light gray with big bands of what look like giant Hershey bars outlining the building’s façade.
This is slightly sideways but one of my favorite moments in a sci-fi story I read, was how a character dealt with a really obstreperous government. He was being told that he had to fill out paperwork somewhere else in order to stay on the planet where he was. So he’d have to spend months getting to ‘somewhere else’, do the paperwork there, and then be unable to get back for years and years. He just blackmailed the person who was making the paperwork demand.
Well, it’s certainly cheaper than the usual real world solution of *bribing* the paperwork demander 😀
Dropping off this lore essay I did for one of my settings, which may be of interest for the way it mixes and matches historical influences to achieve a desired effect.
https://jaglionpress.com/2024/06/05/weird-wednesday-worldbuilding-the-empire-of-noricum/
Would’ve helped if I had included the link, huh?
In my books The Authorities are present as an irritation and comic relief.
What does a policeman really do with a 30,000 ton, fusion powered giant tank? Give it a ticket? Paste a summons on the track skirt? Scream like a little girl when it pops out of hiding next to their cop car?
From Secret Empire:
“The driver of the police car cursed horribly and tossed his radio on the dashboard in disgust. Then he smacked the steering wheel a few times. His partner rolled her eyes and backhanded him on the shoulder. He stopped pounding the wheel and sulked.
Elizabeth looked at Persephone quizzically. “Trouble?”
“Oh yes, we got trouble,” said Persephone the giant. “Right here in River City,” she quoted.
“Ha!” laughed Elizabeth. “Let me guess, they got orders to arrest me.”
“It’s even dumber than that,” sighed Persephone. “Some appalling imbecile ordered them to arrest me.”
“Oh my,” giggled Elizabeth. “That will be very silly, won’t it?”
“The poor police are freaking out in there,” she said with sympathy. “They think I might get mad and squash them.”
“Put me down, I’ll go tell them it’s safe,” Elizabeth replied. She climbed off Persephone’s legs and went over to the cruiser. She knocked on the window with her knuckle.
The blonde police woman in the passenger seat rolled it down. Elizabeth smiled at her in a friendly fashion. “Hi, I’m Elizabeth. I’m a robot ninja. That’s my friend Persephone.” She indicated the giant, who was now leaning back fetchingly on her elbows as if she was at the beach. She wiggled her fingers in greeting. “Did you two come over to see us?”
“Uh, yeah,” said the policewoman, a bit stunned. “We did. Is that okay?” The woman forcibly ignored the machine gun and the black sword hilt over Ellizabeth’s shoulder to focus on her eyes. “We just want to talk a little bit.”
“It’s okay. We promise to behave,” said Elizabeth, then gave her a saucy wink. “Mostly.”
“Woah,” breathed the policeman in the driver’s seat, his upset forgotten.
“Um,” replied the policewoman, staring at her and making no move to get out of the car.
Elizabeth opened the door and held out a hand in invitation. “Come on, I won’t bite you. Swearzies.” She held up her other hand in pledge.
“Swearzies?” asked the policewoman with a sudden grin. “What are we, eight?”
Things continue to run off the rails from there. Of the rails and into the river, really. As I wrote these books it seemed to me that threats and use of force would be a very inefficient way to go about things, and wouldn’t make the Valkyries many friends. They like humans, so they probably wouldn’t cooperate.