Page 137 - Information and American Democracy Technology in the Evolution of Political Power

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Political Organizations
In an effort to explore the ramifications of these brief stories above,
I examined a selective set of cases in greater depth and focused on the
possibility of relationships among properties of information and com-
munication and properties of organization. For this analysis, I chose to
study organizations and groups whose main purpose is national policy
advocacy, or “lobbying,” because of their importance to the structure of
contemporary American politics. Such organizations are also one of the
main features of the second information regime, and it is important to
ask how those organizations are faring in the midst of the contemporary
revolution.
In choosing lobbying organizations, I sought a set of cases sufficiently
diverse to allay concern that the results would be specific to a particular
policy domain or type of organization. I sought cases also with a high
level of visibility on the political agenda. These provide a better indicator
ofstructuralchangethanorganizationsinvolvedinminorpolicy-making
episodes, because prominent cases typically involve a greater investment
of resources in traditional political processes and techniques by estab-
lished interests. Toward this end, members of my research team and I
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conducted a wide-ranging search across national policy areas. Ibegan
by drawing up a list of major policy areas to survey, with the main crite-
ria being salience and heterogeneity. These were: abortion and “family”
issues, civil rights, the economy, education, the environment, gun con-
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trol, health care, and taxation. With this list in hand, we reviewed and
discussed scholarly literature and news accounts pertinent to each area
over the last decade. For the news accounts we relied on the New York
Times, the Los Angeles Times, several news magazines, and political
news clipping services dealing with politics. We worked from the
premise that throughout the 1990s, most organizations were adopting
new information technology in various ways. We therefore looked for
prominent cases covered in the media that appeared to illustrate a range
of consequences. Where we found cases of postbureaucratic forms, we
pursued them. Where we found cases of bureaucratic forms persisting,

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I chose explicitly to exclude state-level cases and minor national policy-making
episodes. My research team for the case studies included three doctoral students
in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara
(UCSB): Joe Gardner, Diane Johnson, and Eric Patterson. Notes indicate the cases to
which each researcher contributed most.
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Compare with Thomas Dye’s categories in his classic textbook on American public
policy, Understanding Public Policy, 7th ed. (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1997).
Dye’s categories are civil rights, criminal justice, health and welfare, education, envi-
ronment, defense, economics, and taxes.

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