Somewhere on the web, I replied to a topic suggesting that a PBBG developer create an in game political model based on "real life." Her game had something to do with players mining/farming/fighting for land, all while working for some other "Lord" player...these players were powerful ones that either were elected, or bought their way into power, etc.

Regardless, the developer wanted to create a political atmosphere. After some discussion, I think the best ways to go about this boiled down to:
1) Assembling a team of story writers
2) Polling players for their RL political ideas

1)Writing the Political Agenda
The idea behind this is that the policial arena is realized through the use of stories. These can be created by the developer, or a team of writers, or from the community itself. This is nice because you have somewhat control over the game. If you are talented, an entire history can be created...I have seen this done in a few games(link here) and it turns out pretty nice...if you expect your players to also become readers.

One thing that I dislike about this idea is that (besides the time or money that would need to be invested) is that there may not be much input from the community. This is not a big deal to some developers...but I think for this case at least, it would be difficult to create a real thriving poltical climate. (The vision here is not well understood.)

2)History Writes Itself
jk.
The idea that I had was to poll users. By asking questions designed to capture political ideas, we could build a basic profile of the players. This profile could then be used to put certain groups of users together for gaming expereince, help users to find others like them in the chat/forum/portal, or deliver targeted ads...or anything else.

You also have the option of making the data private or public...by keeping it private you could group users together and watch the reactions. This may be ethically disagreeable (I have no idea) but could be used for research as well.

One issue is, How to poll users? How do we optain this data on their political ideologies? Well, if you have every played one of those political games (like Nation States), you will have some idea. In these games, players are presented with a question and a yes/no/ignore answer. The engine then updates various "stats" about the nation. This type of model could easily be adapted but would take a while to set up. (Would need to obtain questions, answers, algorithm, then shorten the questions and rewrite them to your game setting.)

What are some other good ways to obtain this type of personal data from the user? Of course there are gaming considerations that are relevant to each individual, but I am thinking that there has got to be some discrete, clever ways of collecting this information.

Searching chat and forums for key words, writing a spider that updates a users political stats as it reads...these are interesting ways. For many game communities, I think players would think of these tactics as highly unethical. That's not the kind of idea that I am talking about, or that the OP had in mind. However, if players knew about this type of data collection (anonymous, private, trusted), there are many intersting things we as developers could do with it.