Page 120 - Information and American Democracy Technology in the Evolution of Political Power

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Postbureaucratic Political Organization
return, they receive selective benefits of some kind, often a magazine or
other literature. Under conditions of information abundance, where the
exchange of detailed information is easy and the cost of communication
low, all three of these features of membership are subject to change.
When organizations can identify interested people and communicate
with them at very low marginal cost, some of the impetus for collecting
dues is diminished. Similarly, as the effort and cost required to commu-
nicate with a group and to engage in collective action falls for citizens,
the need for selective benefits to motivate engagement and participation
is also weakened. Information abundance implies the possibility of less
bureaucratized forms of political membership.
As a result, the focus of collective action can in principle change.
Citizen involvement in public affairs has traditionally involved a tension
between two factors. The first is the impetus for localism, or the tendency
forpeopletounderstandandapproachpoliticalissuesthroughtheirlocal
perspectives. The second is the national scale and general orientation of
most media, especially up through the broadcast era historically, which
tend to direct citizens toward national issues. Because of the cost and
structure of political information, interest organizations have in the past
generally been forced to operate at either one scale or the other, but not
both. Information abundance makes possible flexible, scalable, network-
style organizational structures that are not fixed around either national
or local issues. An organization rich in information and communication
capacity might readily adapt from one scale of issue to the next and back
again.
In the past, most membership-based groups have traditionally experi-
enced high annual turnover and have dedicated substantial resources to
retaining members and attracting new recruits to make up for that attri-
tion. 27 Abundant information has the potential to reorient this process
so that “membership” turnover could approach 100 percent per event,
as citizens “join” an organization solely for the purpose of participat-
ing in a particular activity. This means that the motivation to protect
the environment, promote civil rights, or save the lives of the unborn
may be less important to citizens’ affiliations with political groups than
the motivation to speak out about a specific environmental decision,
register a view about a civil rights law being considered in Congress,
or attend an abortion-clinic protest. This constitutes event-based rather
than interest-based political affiliation.

27
Johnson, “Interest Group Recruiting.”
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