Page 125 - Information and American Democracy Technology in the Evolution of Political Power

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The Fourth Information Revolution
congressional policy. 31 Government officials pay attention when con-
stituents write, occasionally even when the number of communicating
constituents is not high. Most important, they are most likely to attend
to constituent communications when messages show signs of substan-
tialeffort:whentheyarelengthy,personalized,handwritten,orotherwise
indicative of thoughtfulness and real concern. These kinds of constituent
communications signal to government officials the salience of an issue
and also the likelihood that constituents’ electoral behavior in the future
might be conditioned upon an official’s response to the current issue.
Research shows that the effectiveness of citizen communication with
Congress is partly a function of the effort to which constituents have gone
to convey their concerns. Members of Congress tend to discount con-
stituentcommunicationsthatappeartobecentrallyorchestratedthrough
databases and mailing lists or subsidized by organizations through
preprinted postcards or letters. Ken Kollman finds that the growing in-
cidence of such “astroturf” campaigns in the 1980s and ’90s diminished
the marginal value of constituent communications. The problem with
centrally orchestrated, “cheap” communication is not that none of the
citizens participating are serious about the issue at hand, but that such
efforts conceal the extent to which various citizens are interested and seri-
ous. Elected officials have little incentive to ignore serious and interested
constituents and much greater incentive to ignore the background noise
ofthenonserious.ResearchoncommunicationwithCongressshowsthat
over time, as members of Congress learned to recognize and discount
centrally orchestrated communication, interest groups in turn adopted
more sophisticated techniques aimed at either masking the cost of the
message or actually elevating it; these included replacing the prewritten
message with efforts to coach constituents by telephone on how to write
their own personal letters.
In more general ways, information abundance plagues political com-
munication of all kinds: between citizens and government, interest
groups and citizens, and even among citizens themselves. These prob-
lems tend to limit the adoption of inexpensive means of communication
throughout the political system. Together with the dynamics of mass
media and public attention, the need to respond to stable institutions
of government, the need for personal relationships based on trust and

31
John Kingdon, Congressmen’s Voting Decisions,3rded.(AnnArbor:University
of Michigan Press, 1989); Kollman, Outside Lobbying; Stephen Frantzich, Write
Your Congressman: Citizen Communications and Representation (New York: Praeger,
1986).

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