Asymmetrical Information

Politics is already entertainment in most western countries - that is to say the vast majority of people who vote must do so for their entertainment, because as a practical matter any one persons vote will have a very very small chance of effecting the outcome. Same as holding political views - even for elected politicians it is very hard to change anything substantial.

Unless you restrict the concept of a politician to those who are likely to be elected - the impact of the internet on the long tail in politics works quite well - it must be giving small cliques the chance to reach a wider audience.

It seems to me as if the idea of the "long tail" often relies on being able to disseminate things over previously impossible geographical distances; if musician X appeals to, say, .05% of the music-buying public, then he just might be able to gain a decent mass of fans by being on the internet where that's not .05% of one city, but of, potentially, the whole world.

So I don't see that it would apply so strongly to politics, given the combination of geographical limitations and winner-take-all; let's say the Marijuana Legalisation Party has .5% popular support. If these people were to be collected in the same districts, they could hope for a seat or two in congress; but they aren't, and can't.

Surely in politics, the appropriate thing consumed is not an individual representative, but policies as a whole. In that sense, the long tail only applies in a hyper-federalist system. You need the ability for that small group of people to form their own polity where their policy preferences can be enforced without imposing on others.

Extending on John Thacker's observation, it looks like the long tail of politics is substantially the market.

Jane probably knows about this site already, but others might not:

THE HISTORY OF ECONOMIC THOUGHT WEBSITE

Good starting point Piers, but I'd be very cautious about attributing long tail principles merely to majority rule -- exhibited via voting or otherwise. The sheer explosion in number of political viewpoints now available -- online and off -- makes the case equally well.

And if you think the long tail only feeds politics-as-entertainment, consider the case of Howard Dean, whose political wattage was originally sparked online by a ticked-off army of long-tailers -- and all he's merely become chairman of the DNC. Of course, whether you find his actions entertaining or not is beside the current point; but any American political animal has little choice but to "consume" him.

Proportional representation need not in principle have such a high threshold. There was a novel--I think it was L. Neil Smith's The Probability Broach--that described a system of proportional representation in which, rather than having elections, each voter was free to delegate his vote to a representative of his choice.

Under this system, a representative might have millions of constituents or only a few dozen, and his vote in the legislature would be weighted accordingly. In practice, there would probably have to be a lower threshold of 0.1% or so in order to keep the legislature to a manageable size, but it otherwise seems fairly workable to me.

"Would it be enough to "consume" politicians in other ways -- for example, by listening to them and responding to them without actually electing them?"

Ross Perot didn't get elected but had a big effect on the political agenda for years afterward (deficit reduction, etc.). Plus, Clinton (who only got 43% of the vote) might not ever have been elected at all if Perot hadn't been in the race.

Perot went directly to the public through those half hour time slots that he purchased to explain his ideas, but it was expensive to talk directly to the public without having his message 'filtered' by mainstream media. The internet might make such an approach cheaper.

Ann:

But Perot represented large groups of people. There's a big difference between a populist who takes positions popular with many people (but opposed by the two main parties) and taking positions with tiny amounts of support.

Politics tends to be about imposing uniform preferences, getting 50% support. It doesn't matter how heavy the tail of the distribution is, if there are two or more tails, the location for 50% support is going to be in the center. The long tail only makes sense when the small groups of people can choose their results, such as in the market, or with federalism where people can move to towns and locations with their preferred policies.

But even if so, how do we, the voters, consume them?

If I had my way, with fava beans and a nice chianti.

But seriously, our electoral rules are designed/evolved to prevent a long tail. Even Germany, with rules devised to a large extent by us to prevent splinter groups, does better at promoting multiple competing viewpoints.

The U.S. political system, without a major overhaul, will never support "long tail" concepts.

Brandon mentioned a system that I have heard referred to as "Absolute Representation", which has some similarities to governance in pre-Christian Iceland. I'm in favor of a bicameral system as we have now, with absolute representation in the House and the election of Senators restored to the state governments. This would restore the balance of powers between the public-at-large and the intellectual and business elites who would likely influence the choice of senators.

The status quo gives us representatives and Senators who both "represent" districts which are so large that they cannot hope to be in contact with most of the people they represent, and which require vast sums of money in order to get their message out. The result: a muddle in which no one gets decent representation, except those who pay the bills.

There is no need for a lower limit of how many persons a representative must represent in Absolute Representation, given the advances in communications technology, but a lower limit would be required to choose who has a right to a physical presence in the assembly hall, which nevertheless should be larger than the present one. Also, an upper limit may be desirable in order to prevent demagoguery.

Unfortunately, all this is unlikely to happen without a revolution. Those in power are unlikely to desire a change.

))But even if so, how do we, the voters, consume them?

If I had my way, with fava beans and a nice chianti.

Interesting. I was going to suggest that fire from heaven was a popular approach, but now that summer is over, maybe a Mediterranean gourmet is a better option than a barbecue?

I think John Thacker is pointing in the right direction, though. Unless the US is going to move into some sort of Euro-style consensus government where the elected parties fill the legislative offices according to their percentage take of the vote, it's not going to happen in the States. The two dominant parties will continue spending just the resources necessary to capture the 51st out of every 100 voters, with one party succeeding (and possibly taking gravy) and the other party taking the leavings.

Sure, you get a few independents now and then in the State governments, and once in a while someone of that breed turns up in a Congressional office, but ultimately, anyone trying to breach that system at its hull must spend large and capture a pretty big take in order to merely shift the balance of the outcome (let alone become a unique political force), as Perot possibly demonstrated.

Even if one party finally manages to obsolete itself into oblivion -- as the Whig Party once did and as the Democratic leadership seems to be currently attempting -- the successor will be whatever collective manages to broaden its policy base enough to capture the disenfranchised, plus whatever portion of the other party's voters is necessary to breach that 51% mark.

The long tail of politics is opinion. What do they say? Everyone has one. The algorithm of US politics is to aggregate these opinions into two piles from which the politicians nibble on the edges. So the edges are where the action is. It's not exactly clear who is the consumer and who is the producer. The long-tail product, I guess, is off-brand policies.

If you have a third party in the election, they often can matter, but only if they are willing to be flexible. Can you see Gore making Ralph Nader the Secretary of the Interior?

Beyond that, swing voters in early primaries and swing voters in swing states could have a influence if they were willing to join together. Voter unions, composed of such swing voters, could propose policies in exchange for bloc vote commitments. It would only work if there were some group discipline, as with a religious group perhaps, but the potential for exotic policy presentation is there.

While things like Absolute Representation and a larger House of Representatives are both things worth looking at, it's not really Long Tail.

As jj mollo says, everybody has an opinion. The "long tail" is that most everyone actually has a pretty unique opinion in total-- even if conventional on many issues, once you add everything together and consider all possible issues the number of people with the same exact combination will be rare.

But it breaks down because there's no opportunity for each person to have his own unique policy preferences enacted into private law. Even if everyone has a representative, a majority would still be needed to pass laws, and those laws would then apply to everyone. Only microstates, voluntarily joined, would get you to a long tail.

I think politicians do exist solely for our entertainment and don't really govern us.

I'm with the proportional representation folks for getting the "Long Tail" visible in politics. We could take advantage of our bicameral government by making one house PR and keeping the rest the same. Here's how that would look in California.

Hard to have a long tail of Representatives when you only get to elect one, and the entire country has to make do with 450-ish.

If you gave each state 10 Senators instead of 2, you might start to get somewhere.