14.51, Saturday 9 Jun 2001

A General Election is a peculiar event. From individuals voting, to party votes in constituencies, to a single member per constituency, to parties in the House of Commons, to a single party winning, to the party forming a government, to the Cabinet, to the Prime Minister: it's a startling bottom-up process. At each stage we merge data. Consider a map of the votes, it's grainy, stochastic, incredibly detailed. And then we decrease the resolution, throw away information. The map is less detailed, larger blocks of colour. An election is a form of lossy compression, a many-to-one transformation, a bubble-up process. It's the only social system I can think of that exhibits this. Other group activities are more of a transfer of authority to some other individual, a sideways delegation. But in this election case, the choice of the repository of authority is implicit in the transfer. And so it's special.