Page 121 - Information and American Democracy Technology in the Evolution of Political Power

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The Fourth Information Revolution
Together these possibilities imply an acceleration of the speed of pol-
itics, as organizations grow more nimble and their capacity to mobilize
citizens selectively is enhanced. This represents the ultimate solution to
Tocqueville’s information problem: As the marginal cost of information
and communication tends toward zero, political associations can form
and disband at will. To the extent that they do, events should in theory
increasingly drive political structure and organization. To be sure, gov-
ernment and other political processes have in the past been driven by
events as well as by interests and more stable internal agendas of political
organizations. Votes, decisions, elections, economic developments, so-
cial affairs, and media practices have influenced greatly who participates
in politics and what the issues of the day are. But the pace of events has
been overlaid on a structure of comparatively stable, distinct organiza-
tions operating from established agendas and strategies. The resulting
political action has been shaped by a balanced interplay between events
and organizational interests. Conditions of growing information abun-
dance imply a shift in that balance toward greater event-based political
structures.
These features of political organization under conditions of informa-
tion abundance are summarized in Table 3.1 They constitute possibili-
ties for a form of postbureaucratic pluralism. In it, group-based politics
remain vitally important and in tension with the majoritarian politics
of the mass media. But in postbureaucratic pluralism, the structure of
collective action is less tightly coupled than in the past to a marketplace
of formal political organizations. Interest organizations exist, to be sure,
but the patterns and structures of collective action are less reflective and
representative of traditional organizational boundaries and forms.
Theoretically, several important limitations on postbureaucratic
pluralism are clear. First, it is important to note that postbureaucratic
pluralism is not the product solely of technological developments af-
ter 1990. Some postbureaucratic features of politics extend back into
the third information revolution, particularly in the phase of channel
abundance, while others extend further back into trends in civil society
and interest group politics of the 1960s and ’70s. And as Samuel Kernell
and others have noted, changes in communication patterns over the
last few decades of the twentieth century undermined “institutionalized
pluralism” and contributed to a more “individualized pluralism.” 28

28
Samuel Kernell, Going Public: New Strategies of Presidential Leadership,3rded.
(Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 1997), p. 30. For related arguments regarding Congress,

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