Page 211 - Information and American Democracy Technology in the Evolution of Political Power

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Political Organizations
the Bell Foundation of San Francisco, a victim-based gun control group,
in order to better institutionalize themselves. A year and a half later, in
October 2001, they were still in operation and announced a merger with
theBradyCampaignandBradyCentertoPreventGunViolence,formerly
Handgun Control. This meant that the march gained some of the ad-
vantages and resources of the traditional political organization, while the
Brady organization gained the new “membership” and network-based
structure of the march. The consequences of this hybridization of orga-
nizational types remain to be seen, but it represents a recognition of the
limitations on extreme postbureaucratic political association.
Cheap-talk effects are the final form of constraint, and they appear in
the cases in several ways. Many of the organizations found that in the
absenceofcostlimitationsonsendingmessagesto“members,”theyhadto
self-regulate the number of solicitations they distributed. Organizations
now have the capacity to distribute mass mail more than once per day, and
a few did so – especially the campaign organizations. All feel the need
to be selective and careful, however. The Gore campaign in particular
sought to avoid overcommunicating with supporters up until the frantic
final days of the campaign. The environmental groups sought to avoid
“activist fatigue” by carefully rationing their outgoing messages.
Most of the organizations were sensitive to the need to avoid stim-
ulating “junk” electronic correspondence to public officials. This was
especially true of the established organizations such as ED. In early 2001,
forexample,DefendersofWildlifeundertookacampaigntopersuadethe
Bush administration not to overturn a Clinton executive order banning
road building in roadless National Forests. In addition to their sophisti-
cated electronic network, called DEN (Defenders Electronic Network),
the group also employed direct mail and a telephone campaign in which
it called members and then transferred interested citizens directly to the
White House, where they could register their views. The group recog-
nized that this very expensive means of communication would signal
public officials more powerfully than a mass electronic mail campaign.
Perhaps the single most powerful strategy by the groups examined
here is the use of low-cost Internet-based techniques to identify and
organize citizens, followed by more costly efforts by mobilized citizens
to communicate with public officials by phone, postal mail, fax, or in
person.
Data on communication with Congress via electronic mail reveals the
magnitude of the cheap-talk problem. By one estimate, the number of
electronic mail messages directed at the House of Representatives in 2000

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