Authority should be more dynamic, linked to legitimacy and governmental support
The political concessions update has made me think more about authority in the game and what it all represents. Overall, it is usually a very limited resource, made more plentiful by more repressive policies, such as censorship, limiting citizenship/religion, limiting the power base, and a more centralized authority, i.e. king>president>prime minister. But how do these translate into imposing consumption taxes, local government programs (edicts), giving political concessions, imposing censorship/propaganda (suppress and bolster), and creating state monopolies?
At it's heart, authority seems to represent a combination of political capital and executive power. Political capital for concessions and implementing unnamed law/executive orders that create new taxes/programs/etc. But it is mostly disconnected from the political and administrative layers of the game, so it ends up feeling not a part of the whole system but just a layer of "mana".
I think authority, rather than being linked directly to most of the laws, should emerge organically from government legitimacy, popular support, interest group support, political homogeneity, and government state support via the bureaucracy and military.
So for some examples, you pass censorship and maybe you get a small boost to authority representing the state's new intrinsic ability to censor. But then through utilizing censorship, you boost the interest groups representing your government and repress the others. This creates a larger fraction of your population supporting the governmental interest groups, increasing your authority, giving you more freedom to implement more policy.
But that wouldn't be the only way. Maybe you're a liberal democracy that needs authority. Perhaps you always push high taxes when one party has power and lower them when another party has power. This will create interest group attraction to the second party, which over time will increase your authority when they are in power. (I'd also like the ability to shift interest group ideologies over time, which would allow you to more dynamically influence parties, but thats an aside.)
Maybe you pass ethnostate and wealth voting. Turns out your primary culture rich pops are a lot more loyal than all the newly conquered territories forced into plantations. This increases your authority, not just because of the law itself, but since now you are only technically beholden to these people and only their loyalty effects your authority.
Who you have implementing your laws should also effect their effectiveness. If you have a happy intelligentsia, your bureaucracy is running smoothly, you should have high authority. But maybe you implemented a state religion and the bureaucrats don't like that, hurting your authority. Shift over to hereditary bureaucrats and administrative clergy and the new pops may be much more amenable to your new administration and give you authority. (I'd also add new laws to put other pops into administrative roles. A capitalist partially privatized bureaucracy, an officer/soldier military bureaucracy, maybe a farmer/shopkeeper localized bureaucracy.) A bureaucracy deficit should also negatively influence authority and a surplus positively affect it.