Tail potential

Despite these constraints, common sense suggests that political beliefs have a long, long tail

This is the list of top-rated political parties by votes in the UK 2005 general election, plus selected other candidates who were successfully elected.

The total number of votes accounted for in this table is 26,793,483.

But a total of 27,137,208 votes were cast in the election, meaning that candidates other than those in the largest parties gained 343,725 votes.

That would be enough to place an 'others' party in sixth place in the table, easily ahead of the Green Party. If seats accurately represented votes then 'others' would have secured eight out of 649 seats based on the 2005 election results. But freed from existing constraints, how many more might they merit in future?

This 'others' vote total indicates, incidentally, just how wrong it is for the main media companies and others to assume that the independent candidates are of marginal interest to the electorate – it is the election outcome which marginalises them, not the views of the public.

Even in a system that conspires to stifle such voices, they are still demanding to be heard.

And just how stifling the electoral system is can be seen from the following graph of votes for parties and independent candidates in the 2005 UK general election.

UK general election 2005
Votes for parties and independent candidates 

Graph 1: What constrained democracy looks like
Data supplied by Dods political information services

From the winning Labour Party on the left through to the candidate who picked up just one vote (presumably her own) at the end of the tail, the scale with which voters are pushed to the 'hit' parties is clear. It is hard to imagine a more vivid illustration of how distorting existing democratic structures are. Is it remotely plausible that this graph represents the political viewpoints of the British citizens who voted in the election when the Long Tail graph represents the expression of culture in so many other areas of interest, commerce and culture?

It is also important to consider the structure behind this graph. Does it produce a distorted image by treating all 627 Labour Party candidates as one unit equivalent to one independent candidate? The answer is no, although it is important to be clear what it really shows. It is a graph of choices, so one party with one manifesto is one choice. While it is true that individual MPs may disagree with parts of the manifestos on which they are standing, that is not the theoretical basis on which they are elected, and in practice most MPs will support the party line on the vast majority of legislative votes in which they take part.

So the left-hand side of the graph says something about the degree of structural bias towards the 'hits', but the tail also says something.

It shows that despite the costs and the regulatory requirements and the sheer hopelessness of the task, there are people who want to stand and tens of thousands of people prepared to vote for them.

If the structure of democracy was not so constrained, the distribution of votes would look nothing like it currently does.