Platformer

The term “constituency” generally refers a structure found in representative democracies, where an elected or appointed agent is responsible to a segment of a population. These segments may be defined by political boundaries, or by key characteristics or interests (e.g., elderly people, people with chronic diseases, people of color). If such a segment is identified and associated with an agent (usually by means of an election), then the people in that segment are referred to as “constituents”. But, generally, the existence of a representative agent is always implicit—it would seem strange to talk about “constituencies” without representatives.

Yet, in an idealized sense, we can imagine that every individual is a member of multiple constituencies, with a different level of vested interest in each, and that the union of all these memberships constitutes a unique constituency with the individual as the center. If you, as an individual, are empowered as an equal participant in a negotiation of needs and policies, then you are essentially the representative of your own constituency. Other people belong to your constituency, to greater and lesser degrees. We may imagine those other individuals whose priorities and needs most closely match a given constituency’s central individual to be located closest to the center of a circular region, and those who are less and less close in overlap to be farther away. Likewise, you belong to numerous other constituencies.

Of course, you are not and cannot be aware of all these constituencies, or of the memberships of others. These constituencies themselves may also be in constant flux, as new issues come to the fore in your life and others recede, and the same is happening for other people. But conceptually, at least, this seems to capture the reality of the changing beliefs, needs, and priorities of individuals in relation to one another, far more accurately than do political parties.

Note also the critical distinction between this conceptualization, and the more familiar notion of “interest groups”. Interest groups are generally defined externally, and individuals are sorted, or sort themselves, into these groups, and this is thought to be a way of understanding the needs and priorities of people en masse. But the weakness of this approach, aside from the need to continually review and refine the group definitions themselves, is that it omits the point that what is most important about these groups is how they relate to one another. It is not enough simply to register that this segment favors increased handgun controls, and this segment favors lower taxes, and that this segment is the intersection of the two—it is critical to understand the system from the viewpoint of the individual: individuals are not interchangeable, and the flux of influence exerted by different groups over one another owes its dynamism not simply to the numerical size of different segment memberships at any given snapshot in time, but to the history followed by each individual as they adjust their priorities, and positions, based on the flux itself. In other words, this is a classically non-linear system, and analytic approaches that attempt to view it from top-down, outside-in, must always falter on the shores of statistical approximation. Political scientists may make predictions about trends in opinion, and these predictions may sometimes reach a useful degree of accuracy, but this model cannot translate adequately to a system that aims at empowering the individual. Hence our inverted approach, the “individual constituency” model, is a key concept for Platformer, because it assumes from the beginning that we care most about an accurate model of every individual.

Note one other interesting characteristic of this model of constituency: there is not always a hard border delineating who is in and who is out of a constituency. As suggested by the illustration above. This characteristic becomes especially interesting when we consider the next concept, platforms.