Page 122 - Information and American Democracy Technology in the Evolution of Political Power

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Postbureaucratic Political Organization
Table 3.1. Organizational Types in Politics
Bureaucratic political organization Postbureaucratic political organization
1. Collective action requires 1. Collective action does not
substantial material resources on necessarily require substantial
the part of organizers. staff, money, or organization on
the part of organizers.
2. Organizational boundaries are 2. Organizational boundaries are
sharply defined. often permeable and not sharply
defined.
3. Membership is formally defined 3. Informal association and
and structured. affiliation are important and
sometimes replace formal
membership.
4. Collective action is typically 4. Collective action is often
broad-based and oriented narrowly focused on subsets of
toward entire memberships, with members or affiliates, with the
the organization seeking to act as organization reconfiguring itself
a whole on the basis of centrally between issues in opportunistic
determined priorities. responses to the flow of political
events.

Technological trends of the 1990s and 2000s have accelerated and con-
solidated some of those older trends in information and communi-
cation, expanding the possibilities for organizational adaptation and
change.
The spread of postbureaucratic pluralism in response to information
abundance will necessarily be constrained by the psychology and market
dynamics of the traditional mass media. This is especially likely in the
area of campaigning, since the function of attracting the attention of
citizenstoacampaigniscomparativelylowininformation-intensiveness.
Campaigningismoreagameofcitizenattentionthancitizeninformation
andlearning,andtraditionalmassmedia,especiallybroadcasting,should
remain superior at this task. In the 2000 elections, the cost of political
advertising approached $1 billion. 29 For parties and candidates, as well

see Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, eds., The New Congress (Washington,
D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, 1981).
29
Source: Alliance for Better Campaigns, http://www.bettercampaigns.org/documents/
rele30601.htm.

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