Microparty tools
Existing websites such as ConservativeHome and LabourList or MoveOn.org are not the endpoint of politics on the internet, but just a first step.
Indeed one post on ConservativeHome suggested that "if ConHome teaches us anything, it is that the range of opinion in the Conservative Party is... very varied, and internal debate is alive and well".
How long will it be before that diversity can no longer be contained in one party?
But this is not just about the internet pushing more support towards mid-sized parties such as the Green Party, the UK Independence Party or Respect.
It is, instead, about change even further down the curve – the creation of microparties and a fundamental shift in support towards them.
But as these new parties are formed, they will, as the Long Tail theory suggests, need to find ways of connecting with their potential voters.
At present these tools exist only as simple websites which ask a limited series of questions and suggest a political party on the basis of the answers given.
This, while something of a step forward, still fails to capture the complexity of real political views because it takes the diversity of individual opinions and funnels it into the limited political choices currently available. And existing 'which party should you vote for' sites rarely extend beyond the major parties in any event, so fail to represent even the limited diversity which currently exists.
Anderson argued that there are three forces driving the Long Tail.
The first of these is the democratising of production. In politics, this would imply greatly expanding the number of parties and candidates, which in turn would mean making it easier to create parties.
Creating a party is, for the time being, going to remain governed by a set of demanding regulations.
However, even with these requirements, it is possible to imagine the creation of a website which provides standard templates, forms and tools for creating, registering and running a simple political party.
Such an organisation would need no headquarters, no paid staff, no advertising, no spokesmen, no elected officials, no campaigning. It would simply need one or more people committed to a policy or policies that they want to make available to the voters during an election.
In the medium term it is likely that such parties would need a new 'light touch' regulatory framework as the rules that currently apply to parties actively (and intentionally) discourage citizens from participating in the democratic process which is meant to serve them.
Such restrictions need to be swept away to enable microparties to flourish. Instead of politicians being the 'producers' of politics with the public as consumers, knowledge and tools will spread to enable the public to become producers – just as they are now producers of music, video and journalism.
As Anderson noted, the distinctions between professionals and amateurs will blur. "When the tools of production are available to everyone, everyone becomes a producer," he wrote in The Long Tail.
In its application to politics, one way of understanding this is to consider the process of commoditisation but with the citizen's vote taking the place of the consumer's capital.
When products become commoditised, their uniqueness and brand values become less important and they tend to be judged solely on price.
However, instead of voters moving to the cheapest goods as they would in a market, they will move to those which most match their interests. In effect, a vote becomes the capital a citizen is spending.
The second Long Tail force is the democratising of distribution. As Anderson wrote: "The fact that anyone can make content is only meaningful if others can enjoy it."
In politics, this means more votes being cast for these new smaller parties, lifting the flatline graph of constrained democracy up so that it more closely resembles a Long Tail market. It is helped by the obvious fact that the cost of ideas is zero; they can be shared, developed, spread, accepted and rejected without limit.
And Anderson's third force is "tapping consumer sentiment to connect supply to demand".
This means a new set of tools to help voters find the parties they want from a much-expanded set of choices.
It will involve applying the range of searching, filtering, tagging and sharing tools which are already widespread across a range of e-commerce sites.
This time they will not be applied to consumer goods, however, but to political parties. Politics, which may for some people have previously been something to keep private, will be seen as another form of content to be shared and discussed. It can be used to express self-identity in the same way as an iPod playlist.
As David Weinberger wrote in Everything is Miscellaneous, "discovering what you want is at least as important as finding what you know you want".
And Helen Margetts (2001) also suggested that online mechanisms can increase voter satisfaction and participation.
"A democracy where voters become involved in policy decisions and candidate selection at the painless click of a button may be more vibrant than one where a dwindling number of disillusioned members force themselves to tramp the streets at election time." [i]
Voters may not be fully aware of all of their policy preferences, or even of the range of areas which actually have policies, but effective tools can help them navigate their way through the choices – away from the hits and towards the niches.
One innovation, which might be included in the tools to create microparties, could be a standard XML schema for manifestos. This would allow parties to input their policies, and then generate a feed of them for any website which would like to take them for comparison, tagging, analysis, criticism or any other reason.
As e-voting of one kind or another becomes more sophisticated, such tools could be incorporated into the polling booth (assuming such a thing continues to exist and voting is not instead done from the comfort of your own home) itself so voters are given more meaningful information than just a list of names and parties at the point of decision.
They can search for what they want and vote for it, as they would search for a product they want and buy it, perhaps after looking at recommendations from other consumers/citizens.
The effect of these tools is that microparties will see an increase in what Helen Margetts has described as "comparative nodality"; in effect a measure of how well connected they ultimately are to voters and other key groups which is perhaps a rather more theoretical description of Leadbeater's 'pebbles'.
"Given that political parties compete with all types of organisation, particularly pressure groups, for citizens' attention, if private companies and pressure groups are at the forefront of developing web presence, political parties that do not develop a web presence will find themselves losing comparative nodality." [ii]
While the need to build effective internet presences has been recognised by all parties, and implemented with varying degrees of success, the effect of the tools outlined here will be to give both a qualitative and a quantitative boost to the means by which microparties can take their messages to the public, and the ease with which the public can find them.
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