Page 207 - Information and American Democracy Technology in the Evolution of Political Power

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Political Organizations
technology expands capacity to organize collective action, so the dotted
curve is positioned above the solid curve, as shown in the figure. But it
may be that capacity to organize collective action actually accelerates as
resources go up, with the curve growing more steep across the horizon-
tal axis as greater investments in information technology produce ever
larger marginal gains in organizing power. The case of ED and the ma-
jor election campaigns supports this interpretation. On the other hand,
some of the cases suggest that information abundance simply makes the
relationship between resources and political influence less predictable. In
any event, the overall effect of information abundance is neither a simple
“leveling of the political playing field,”assomeobservershavespeculated,
nor a reinforcement of traditional patterns of influence and power. In the
new information environment, both wealthy and poor political groups
may each find their hand strengthened, in different ways. Traditionally
powerful groups can exploit low-cost communication and new levels of
control over information to strengthen what they do, just as traditionally
weak groups may find that on occasion they can use new technology to
becomeplayersinapoliticalgamethatisotherwiselargelyclosedtothem.
Changes in boundary conditions in some of the cases are related to
these resource considerations. Information abundance does appear to
offer the potential for more porous organizational boundaries in at least
two ways. Especially in the case of Environmental Defense and the E-Rate
coalition, the rapid, intensive movement of information between orga-
nizations strengthened opportunities for forming coalitions. In these
coalitions, sharing of material resources and the costs of political action
is far less important than moving pertinent information. As a result,
the particular distribution of traditional resources among organizations
may in some cases be less important to the structure of collective action
that results when organizations join together. Second, at the low end
of the resource scale, lack of institutionalization and diminished costs
may induce some groups to exert comparatively little effort at defining
and controlling their boundaries. Groups that invest few resources in
their efforts, like the Libertarians and the Million Mom March at the
outset, may be more likely to take a laissez-faire approach to who partic-
ipates and to how information is controlled and managed. In general, as
information becomes abundant and inexpensive, it moves more readily
throughout the political system and is less constrained by the boundaries
of organizations. As information becomes less well institutionalized in
this way, the boundaries of some organizations themselves become less
important.

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