Multiple tails

In considering how the issue of legitimacy can be addressed, it is important to understand another of the constraints which democracy currently imposes.

In Part I it was suggested that there is a long tail of politics waiting to be unleashed.

Unsurprisingly, however, reality is even more complicated than this. In fact, there are multiple long tails covering every conceivable policy area, from health to the economy and from defence to environmental regulation.

If choice was really unconstrained, it would be made up of a series of long tail graphs representing different policy areas. The X axis of these graphs would show not parties/candidates but policy areas.

The health graph, for example, might cover a spectrum of views and options from public health care through various not-for-profit models to private health insurance, each with different costs and benefits. These would be arranged on the X axis not as though on a left-to-right political spectrum but by their levels of popularity.

Political party manifestos are an amalgam of many different policy tails. They have to be because a vote is an amalgam of the many different views that a citizen might have.

Democracy not only constrains choice by limiting the number of parties which can control the levers of power, but it also forces voters to accept policy compromises by massively narrowing the combinations of policies they can support, cutting an almost infinite theoretical range down to two realistic options.

A voter who has perhaps left-leaning views on the environment but right-leaning views on defence policy will most likely find they have to trade one off against the other when given only the choice of voting for a single party.

Weinberger wrote in Everything is Miscellaneous: "As we invent new principles of organisation that make sense in a world of knowledge freed from physical constraints, information doesn't just want to be free. It wants to be miscellaneous."

The same point applies to political views, which are in reality miscellaneous and disaggregated in comparison to the ways in which they are usually organised and grouped.

It is rare that two people would agree on every political issue. Indeed people may have views on some issues that would be seen as left-wing, while holding views on others that might be described as right-wing. Yet they are still required to amalgamate all these views into a single choice.

The long tails of political viewpoints want to be freed from false choices and classifications that might apply in the world of political science but hold less meaning in the world of everyday lives.

To the extent that existing democratic systems allow voters to express this complexity of their real political views, it is already being used in large numbers. As Margetts (2001) noted:

"The decline of strong identity is not the same thing as abandonment. What has changed is the increasing willingness of voters to support a plurality of political parties, both for different levels of government and at different periods of time...

"An ESRC funded poll carried out straight after the 2000 elections suggests that the mean number of parties voted for was 2.3 – 27 per cent of voters voted for three parties and 6 per cent of voters voted for four parties. There is evidence that split-ticket voting across general and local elections runs at around 20 per cent and has done so consistently since the 1970s. Now that representatives of smaller parties and Independents have been elected to national and supra-national legislatures, we might expect voters' willingness to vote for multiple parties to increase still further." ^[i]

And as Philip Lynch and Robert Garner (2005) have noted, while two-party politics in the House of Commons continues, "the disjuncture between bipolar politics in Parliament, and multi-party competition in elections at all levels, becomes ever more pronounced" ^[ii].

So this provides further evidence of why a single manifesto fails to represent the complex views of the public, and indicates that the public is comfortable with using multiple votes to express their wishes.

This point also, as it happens, highlights the basic failure of the political spectrum model of analysing political positioning, with left, centrist and right distributed along the X axis. Attempting to distribute each voter, or group of voters, along it serves to hide the complexity of the views which any one individual may hold.

[i] Margetts, H. (2001), p. 4.

[ii] Lynch, P. and Garner, R. (2005), ' The Changing Party System', Parliamentary Affairs, Vol. 58 No. 3, p. 553.