Page 206 - Information and American Democracy Technology in the Evolution of Political Power

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Summary of the Cases 18:0
little funding. They then used that organization to attract media atten-
tion, funding, endorsements, and more volunteers.
The larger, richer organizations also exploited low-cost information
and communication to expand their reach. Environmental Defense and
some of the other environmental organizations, and to a lesser extent
the NEA and its allies in the E-Rate campaign, were able to lower their
marginal cost of identifying interested citizens and mobilizing them into
political action. Doing so, however, required substantial investments of
resources that raised net costs. The cost of the technological infrastruc-
ture necessary to realize lowered marginal costs of communication was
typicallyhigh,sothoseorganizationsbestabletoinvestinnewtechniques
reaped the largest benefits.
Increased fixed requirements in resources is especially clear in the
case of the electoral campaigns. Several of the campaigns remarked at
how inexpensively they could communicate with supporters through
the Internet. Lynn Reed of the Bradley campaign says, “In the summer,
we decided to canvas in New Hampshire ... so we e-mailed about 5,000
people who were within driving distance. ... About 300 replied, and of
those, about two thirds showed up. We could never have afforded to
make the phone calls with that rate of return.” 217 Tim Haley, campaign
manager for Pat Buchanan’s Reform Party race in 2000, goes so far as
to say that by using new technology, “It doesn’t cost anything to get
people to events.” 218 It did, however, cost the campaigns to establish their
Internet-based systems. For most of the campaigns, operating Internet-
basedtoolsaddedtothecostofrunningforoffice.Thefactthatthebetter-
funded campaigns made the most sophisticated use of the technology
drives home the point that the new information environment does not
necessarily advantage the underdog.
The pattern suggested by the five cases is that larger and more well-
established political organizations invest in expensive information sys-
tems that raise the cost of doing business on the whole but that per-
mit them to project political influence under the right conditions even
further than before. Smaller, poorly endowed organizations tend to use
new information technology to substitute for resources they do not have,
which creates new opportunities for exercising political influence. In
terms of the hypothesis represented in Figure 3.1, the diminution of the
threshold effect finds support in these cases. The relationship farther
up the curve is less clear on the basis of these cases. Clearly, information

217 218
Reed, personal interview. Haley interview.
189