The Advantages of being a small Political Party. (Part 2)

 Prices Law (see last post) is a nightmare for large political parties.

But it doesn’t necessarily apply as-is to smaller parties. So being a smaller party is not all bad. Also being small can give you some tactical advantages over the well resourced, well financed, larger legacy party opposition.

So what’s the difference? Why doesn’t Price’s Law apply to small political set-ups like it does to large parties?

One of the main reasons is a member of a smaller party like (say) the SDP has more skin in the game than a member of (say) the Labour Party.

Being a member a small party requires far more personal commitment than to a large party. You are “out on a limb”. What you are doing is unusual. Instead of following the crowd you are breaking away from the pack. You have stepped away from the comfort of a crowd. Consequently to do this you are far more likely to have embarked on this course specifically to action some form of change.

Whereas a Labour party member is in a huge cosy club where they don’t have to do anything and nobody bothers them. In fact the bureaucracy and tiered elitism actively discourages it.

They can remain anonymous in their comfort zone yet gain all the personal kudos of “doing something”. Whereas in fact they’re just drinking cheap beer down the Labour club.

For a small party this personal commitment gives the leadership the opportunity of engaging with the membership on a much more dynamic level.

Most people in political parties both large and small, join to try and make a difference. But very few (especially in the large legacy parties) are given any significant opportunity to do so.

But in all parties whatever their size have a problem. While members join and want to affect change they literally have no idea what to do to affect that change. Or help it along it’s way.

In essence they mean well. But they don’t know what to do to affect that change. Consequently most end up being paper members. This is inevitable in a large bureaucratic party like the Labour Party but can be ameliorated in a small party.

A smaller party has much greater opportunity to involve it’s membership in policy making and actioning of party goals and aims. Consequently it obeys what is known as The 90-9-1 Law.

With 90-9-1 Law, in a party of 3500 members, approximately 35 are the real heavy lifters, another 315 contribute to varying degrees and the final 3150 are passive.

BUT this law can be tweaked.

There is far, far less bureaucracy and a “who you know” mentality in a small party. If it structures some activities to accommodate occasional participation, it can allow members to dip in and out without demanding long term commitment to any one target/activity.

Everybody hates open ended commitments. So if a small party avoids these where possible, people will be more willing to contribute. The 90-9-1 spread of participation can become more like 80-16-4 but only if contribution is made easier and more worthwhile.

A large party has many more tiers. The average novice member is far more isolated and remote from those guiding the party. They are anonymous. The structure and hierarchy is complex, bureaucratic, confusing and intimidating. There is far, far less potential to get novice members to engage than in a small party. There is little to no leeway in modifying the depressing stricture of Prices law.

A small party is therefore already at an advantage. But in engaging party members in small clearly defined activities a small party can break out from the 90-9-1 Law and so multiply it’s effectiveness. All by simply involving it’s membership in clearly defined, straight forward tasks that have a clear beginning and end.

It just needs to figure out what these tasks need to be.

As you’ve probably guessed there’ll be more on exactly what these tasks are in another post coming in the next week or so.

Bye for now

Love & Kisses

Billo.

The Advantages of being a small Political Party. (Part 1)

Back in the 1960’s Derek J de Solla Price theorised that if you added up all the scientific papers published, you would find that half of the papers published were published by the square root of of the number of authors.

Since then it has been refined and found to be actually (in many cases) even more stark.

Prices law (and it’s derivatives) has been applied to many different fields. Especially in regard to aspects of Human endeavour.

It doesn't apply in scheduled environments. Obvious examples are bus drivers, A&E doctors, train drivers. These are scheduled and constrained and other laws apply here. But for a dynamic organisation say a software company or (dare I say it) a political organisation Prices law and/or it's derivatives described the situation well.

In such large human organisations, Prices law dictates that the square root of the number of members (or employees) do half the activity/work. Think on that.

So an organisation with 9 members, 3 do half the work and the other 6 do the other half.

If it’s a hundred employees then 10 do half the work and the other half is done by the other 90.

If it’s a 1000 then 32 do half the work and the other half gets done by the other 968.

So lets apply Prices Law to a small political party like the SDP* and compare it to (say) the Labour Party.

*[this is actually too pessimistic for the SDP. I’ll explain why in part 2]

The SDP has, I believe, about 3500 members.

So applying Prices Law to the SDP, 60 do half the work and the other 3440 do the other half.

Shocked? Don’t be. Because it is far, far worse for the legacy parties.

Let us look at (say) the Labour Party. Labour has a membership of around 250,000.*

*[In this case Prices Law applies, and I’d suggest is pretty damn accurate]

Barely more than 500 members of the Labour Party do half the work. Remember though, by having 250,000 members there is one hell of a lot of extra administration, overheads and policy discussion.

The “work” of running the party will be considerably higher than that of the SDP, even if Prices Law applied directly (it doesn’t) to the SDP. Many of those 500 active Labour Party members will be soaked up doing admin.

The Labour Party and the other legacy parties as well as organisations like the Civil Service and the NHS have reached a size where arguably any increase in size will lead to less efficiency and less productive output. (Note: Prices Law will only apply to certain aspects of the NHS)

Getting anything done in the Labour Party, like new policies, projects, reviews or even simple governance must be like walking through a quagmire with little knowledge of where you are heading or why. Trying to change course on a failing policy must be a nightmare.

It does actually explain a lot about the lack-lustre nature of the top echelon of the Labour Party. To get to where they are, the top echelon have had to be party careerists and committee people.

Few (if any?) have actually done anything outside politics. Their skills (as they are) revolve around agenda’s, points of order and resolutions. Whatever spark they once had to get things other than party procedure done died long ago.

They are dull procedure driven people who only expertise is spouting word-salad speeches about things they often have literally no direct knowledge. Meanwhile they ambush and back-stab their way to the top through interminable committees and focus groups.

When anyone does come up with a spark they face an agonising quagmire of careerists and bureaucracy to get it pushed forward.

But it’s not just the Labour Party. Prices Law applies to all large parties.

The Greens and Reform are currently somewhat lucky in that they have an enthusiastic (though inexperienced) new membership. But that will settle. People will lose their enthusiasm and will be less willing to do “something for nothing” or be put upon to aid the tediously ambitious. They’ll start sitting back and Prices Law will assert itself.

The Conservatives are in a slightly strange position. How many of their movers & shakers left to join Reform? Their membership has shrunk. But has the pool of talent shrunk even more?

Who knows.

Finally there’s the Liberal Democrats. Personally I regard the Lib Dems as a possible challenge to Prices Law. They seem to be completely devoid of talent at the highest level. Though they do have quite a few enthusiastic and committed members. Maybe at ~60,000 paid up members they are broaching into Prices Law from 90-9-1 Law.

So what the Hell is the 90-9-1 Law you may say.

Rather than Prices Law, the 90-9-1 law I believe governs membership activity in small dynamic parties like the SDP (and other dynamic small paid-up parties for that matter too)

And the next post?

You guessed it

The Advantages of being a small Political Party. (Part 2)

Bye for now.

Love & Kisses

Billo