Page 124 - Information and American Democracy Technology in the Evolution of Political Power

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Postbureaucratic Political Organization
notwithstanding. The need for collective action organizations to orient
themselves to the structures and processes of largely unchanging insti-
tutions of the state creates limits on the advantages of postbureaucratic
forms.
A related constraint stems from the need for personal relationships
between state officials and representatives of civil society. The kinds
of interpersonal actions and relationships that connect public officials
to lobbyists, industry leaders, academics, and others are not driven by
information costs, and their importance is hardly diminished by tech-
nological advances that produce information abundance. While some
forms of interpersonal interaction may be facilitated by such abundance,
a vast array of political relationships based on familiarity and trust lie at
the center of politics. Familiarity and trust are only marginally matters
of information.
A fourth constraint on postbureaucratic organization involves the
need for sustained performance across events and issues. The event-
driven orientation of postbureaucratic pluralism makes it less well suited
to repeated collective action and sustained performance throughout the
policy process than more traditional bureaucratic pluralism. Many of
the features that make postbureaucratic organization highly adaptive to
event-driven politics are disadvantages to the group faced with working
through a lengthy legislative or rule-making process.
Perhaps the most important and pervasive limitation on postbureau-
cratic forms involves cheap-talk effects and the tendency for any item
of information or communication to mean less as the overall volume of
information and communication rises. Information abundance can lead
to information fatigue as well as the reasonable calculation by political
actors that a message sent cheaply means less than one sent expensively.
One useful feature of an information economy with great variation in
the price of communication is that senders can more easily signal the
importance of a message. Information abundance tends to flatten the
price of communication and weaken this signaling function. It is for this
reason, as is sometimes said, that employers post job advertisements on
the Internet but send the offer letter by Federal Express. In an environ-
ment of abundant political information and communication, it remains
important to find comparable strategies for differentiating important
messages from the routine.
A small body of research dealing with cheap-talk effects already exists
in connection with congressional politics. This research has shown that
citizen communication with Congress can be effective in influencing

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