Page 109 - Information and American Democracy Technology in the Evolution of Political Power

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The Fourth Information Revolution
potentially important change in the structure of political information
and the opportunities and constraints on communication afforded po-
litical actors. New means for elites to distribute and acquire information,
new possibilities for citizens to identify and communicate with one
another, changes in the ways that citizens interact with the news system,
and the historical preservation of information, among other develop-
ments, contribute toward a state of information abundance in the political
system.
The lesson of the sequence of historical information revolutions is that
information abundance should have important effects on political orga-
nizations as intermediaries. It is possible to develop specific expectations
about what those effects likely are by examining theories of association
and organization. These can illuminate the possible responses of the
political system to information abundance as it has developed so far.

THE BUREAUCRATIC CONCEPTION OF PLURALISM
Alexis de Tocqueville is the first theorist of information and political
association following the Federalists and Antifederalists. His observa-
tions about American democracy in the 1830s, at the time of the first
information revolution, are useful for understanding what information
abundance might mean for political association and organization.
Tocqueville’s claim that Americans were obsessed with the formation of
civic and political associations remains entrenched in scholarship on
American civil society and political pluralism. However, more often for-
gotten is Tocqueville’s theory of the relationship between information
and group formation. Tocqueville believed that while Americans pos-
sessed a natural habit of association and an inclination toward cooper-
ation, their efforts at collective action also confronted natural problems
of information.
Forming associations requires information and communication,
Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America. First, citizens must rec-
ognize mutual interests in one another. Doing so requires the flow of
information, and so the richer the information environment in which
citizens live, the more likely they are to recognize others with compati-
ble or complementary concerns and position themselves to act mutually.
Second, citizens must establish some form of communication with those
sharing their interests. Without adequate information, these steps from
common interest to common action are precarious. “It frequently hap-
pens that a great number of men who wish or who want to combine

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