Ah, so many venues in which politics evolves.
There is a divide between Amber and its sister city of Rebma. This came about for many reasons, not least of them the purely personal issues of Randoms ongoing contempt for the city, and the fury of its leading citizens at the King.
Amber and Rebma are both colonial powers, both seeking trade and influence in the same set of worlds: those places which can be reached by people other than the Princes of Amber, by means of the established and mapped routes through shadow. Advantage on these grounds is sought both institutionally (by the governments negotiating and establishing embassies) and unofficially (by citizens seeking freedom, profit, or some other motive establishing trade and colonies). As usual, the unofficial travellers tend to be the ones to break new ground and make first impressions.
While there is some slight preference of Rebmans for places based around the water, there is the same preference for Amber's vast trading navy. It might prove possible for the two cities to amicably divide the worlds into spheres of influence, but this has not happened at this time.
Beyond the contest for limited resources, there are cultural issues involved which make it yet harder for Amber and Rebma to see eye to eye. Amber colonies are generally organized in such a way as to change the land and its people to fit the new residents. So, wherever they have gone, Amber has brought a tradition of law and discipline, which has been adopted to varying degrees by the native culture. There is a strong sense of unity among the colonies, and even among the client states... a strong sense of allegiance to Amber itself.
Rebman colonies, by comparison, often change the new residents to better fit the land and its people. Rebman citizens who live in two different shadow worlds have far less in common with each other (or even with citizens of Rebma proper) than any two citizens of Amber colonies. As a result, Rebma has achieved far greater cultural diversity by incorporating the thoughts of others, but at a price. While Rebman colonies feel a strong allegiance to the principles of Rebma, they do not feel as much allegiance to the city itself.
Since the efforts of the Elders to create a constitutional monarchy with loosely representational government, the Amber Council of Lords has grown far beyond its original (rather formalized and trivial) beginnings. It is, of course, no longer restricted to the noble class. Indeed, a noble background is, under the increasing populist feeling of the city, becoming an active detriment to being re-elected to the Council.
The exact scope of the Council's mandate is far from clear. Councillors for decades have actively pressed the edges of the original mandate. No longer do they restrict themselves to laws governing the city and its surrounding countryside. They also mandate the rules by which the merchant guilds must conduct business in order to retain their economic privilege in the city, and by that they have achieved wide-ranging influence over much of Ambers economic policy.
More recently, they have also begun to exert powerful control over the broad goals of the military coalition headed by Amber, and dedicated to the defense of the Golden Circle as a whole. In just the past few weeks, the Council has finally approved the Force Unification Project: this sweeping set of bills legislates the replacement of Julian's Rangers as the guardians of Arden and Ambers last line of infantry defense. In their place it appoints a group of GC forces on a rotating basis. Also dispersing the Rangers into shadow to work alongside GC military forces, the Unification Project has as its stated goal the furthering of alliance and understanding between the military of Amber and those of its allies. But there are those who point out that if Prince Julian refuses these orders, it will set the stage for an unprecedented conflict between Council and Prince... one that may very well determine whether a democratic government can survive the presence of the Royal Family.
This conflict has been eagerly sought by the dominant faction in the Council, the Social Alliance, or "Alliance" for short. These Councillors are nominally followers of the rationalist writings of the now-dead philosopher Montaigne. His vision of a world in which emotion and tradition are set aside as counter to the social good has proven very powerfully resonant with many people. When the Alliance was a minorty view, they argued simply that a greater trend toward rationality would be able to help people make better sense of the traditions of Amber in a more modern setting. Now that they are the plurality (though not the majority, see below) their cry has changed. Now they want to lead Amber toward a glorious future, in which the ignorance of the past has no part.
Most directly and vehemently opposed to the Alliance are the Royalist Party. They had their origins in a cabal of nobles who opposed the move to a democratic system. Having lost that battle, they gamely offered their known talents and history of idealistic sacrifice, and were elected overwhelmingly into the Council. The ideological descendants of those first noble heel-draggers believe strongly that if Amber abandons the lessons and ideals that made the city great in the first place, it will lose all that gives it strength and importance. The Royalist Party has a very delicate relationship with the King... of course respect for the crown is one of the foremost of Amber's traditions, and so their criticism of his policies of wild iconoclasm is always exceedingly careful and delicate. This robs them of the fiery oratory of the Alliance, and has been a contributing factor to their being eclipsed.
Also robbing from the strength of the Royalist Party is the Green Party, a group of more radical cultural and intellectual figures who argue that Ambers traditions should be borne in mind not because they are inherently right, but because they are a sensible, well-tried groundwork upon which to base a government that uses all the best talents of Amber's people, mind and heart alike. They portray the Alliance as cold-blooded logicians who bruise and brutalize the ideals and beliefs of the very people they represent. At the same time, they portray the Royalists as unthinking clods who sway with emotion and history because they cannot appeal to the intellect. Perhaps most daming of all, the Green Party holds of Rebma and its people as an example that Amber could learn from, just as they argue that Amber has much to teach to Rebma. They are a minority, but a very vocal one.
In recent years, the Alliance has become very good at discrediting members of the Green Party during elections. The result is that almost every Green Party seat has come at the expense of a Royalist seat. This has, naturally enough, set the Green Party and the Royalists at each others throats... though the Alliance does not control a majority of the Council, they can often split the Green and Royalists on a particular issue, and thus maintain their dominance.
The Golden Circle as a whole has only the loosest possible form of government. While each of the member worlds has their own government (usually several), there is little or no formalized forum for their representatives to deal with issues on the larger scale.
Informally, however, the King's Progress and its attendant spectacle provide a travelling venue in which diplomats of dozens of worlds meet and greet. They speak openly, and they maneuver in closed rooms. Only rarely are their full assemblies, though small clusters of like-minded individuals are a staple of Progress politics. Cabals form and dissolve with a sometimes manic glee, as if somebody had placed a video-tape of history in a VCR and held down the fast-forward button relentlessly.
The result of this is an often tangled and incomprehensible set of trade laws, mutual defense pacts and joint economic projects. But perhaps far more important are the changing constellations of personal grudges, favors owed and alliances sought, not between the countries but between the very human representatives themselves.