Page 115 - Information and American Democracy Technology in the Evolution of Political Power

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The Fourth Information Revolution
suggeststhatcertainpoliticalorganizationsmightalsoevolveinthedirec-
tion of nonbureaucratic structure as a result of information abundance.
The class of political organization most like the firm is collective action
organizations: the kinds of associations that concerned Tocqueville, as
well as the modern interest group that emerged from the second infor-
mation revolution and developments following it. Like firms, collective
action organizations are competitive and private. Both are regulated only
to a point and, unlike political parties, are not connected by law to the
state in any substantial way. Like firms, but not parties and especially not
like government institutions, collective action organizations are largely
free to reorganize and adapt themselves independently to changing con-
ditions in their environment without the necessity of agreement by other
institutions, public support, or legislative or constitutional action.
And collective action organizations are above all else, truly organiza-
tions, not merely groups or movements. As Mancur Olson writes in The
Logic of Collective Action, “most (though by no means all) of the action
taken by or on behalf of groups of individuals is taken through orga-
nizations.” 14 For Olson, a group is not simply a number of individuals
who share a common interest, and the collective action problem is not
simply the failure to overcome free-riding inertia; it is also a problem
of organization building. Free riding results in the failure “to organize
a lobby to obtain a collective benefit,” that is, to build organization. 15
Olson’s attack on “analytical pluralists” such as David Truman is ad-
dressed largely to “their lack of concern for organization.” 16 Truman’s
mistake, Olson argues, was to believe that a “latent group” is the the-
oretical equivalent of the organized group. Since Olson, most scholars
have implicitly or explicitly accepted the premise that groups who are
active in politics are organizations; this implies that the pluralistic struc-
ture of American politics throughout most of the twentieth century was
a marketplace of political organizations, not simply a realm of inter-
ested groups. As Jeffrey Berry writes, “an interest group is an organized
body of individuals. ... ‘Farmers’ do not constitute an interest group, yet
the National Association of Wheat Growers, the American Farm Bureau
Federation, and the National Milk Producers Federation are all bona fide
interest groups. The central distinction between farmers and any one
of these is organization” (emphasis in the original). 17 Interest groups

14 Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 5.
15 16
Ibid., p. 132. Ibid., p. 129.
17
Jeffrey M. Berry, The Interest Group Society (Boston: Little, Brown, 1984), p. 5.
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