Demographics-Approval rating. What is this?

[make]

Can anyone please explain what approval rating is.

Im sorry if this have been explained somewhere, but I havent been able to find anything on this subject.

I suspect it has something to do with how good diplomatic relations I have with the other civs, but im not sure.

[JimG]

I would have thought its to do with the total number of happy faces in your empire, but am only guessing based on Civ II.

[Kinjiru]

Looking throught the calculations done on the screen, it does appear that approval is related solely to city happiness:

Here is the relevant code where it calculates relative values:

if (pCurrPlayer.calculateTotalCityHappiness() > 0):
aiGroupHappiness.append(int((1.0 * pCurrPlayer.calculateTotalCityHappiness()) / (pCurrPlayer.calculateTotalCityHappiness() \
+ pCurrPlayer.calculateTotalCityUnhappiness()) * 100))
else:
aiGroupHappiness.append(50)

[make]

Thank you

[Bobby Chicken]

I think it has to do with both, then, because I have had my rating go up (and down) after diplomatic actions.

[proviisori]

Did you get happiness resouces in trading or lost them because of war? That would explain the change.