Page 213 - Information and American Democracy Technology in the Evolution of Political Power

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Political Organizations
personal visits, and telephone calls at the top in importance; followed
by faxes and serious electronic mail; and, in a distant third place, peti-
tions, postcards, and form-letter campaigns, whether in electronic form
or sent by mail. 225 In 2000, members of Congress adopted a policy aimed
at helping them filter nonserious electronic mail from constituent com-
munications of relevance. Under the new policy, members stopped ac-
cepting electronic mail sent directly from citizens, and instead required
that constituents who wanted to send mail fill out web-based electronic
mail forms. This mechanism made mass mailings difficult technically
and provided a control on constituency status through zip code requests.
From the members’ perspective, potential advantages of messages com-
municated this way include the capacity to create flexible analyses of
constituent comments and interests readily and automatically.
These efforts by public officials and political organizations to deal with
new, low-cost communication techniques constitute a search for balance
and proportion that is still in its initial stages of development. Politi-
cal organizations know that the capacity to distribute messages cheaply
guarantees that one can neither persuade citizens to become engaged
nor convince elected officials that engaged citizens should be taken seri-
ously. This fact limits the occasions in which low-cost alternative forms
of collective action can be successful.
The cases suggest that a tension exists between new postbureaucratic
political structures made possible by the latest technology and the set of
traditional political structures and processes that in many ways remain
dominant, at least so far. As they have in the past, bureaucratic organi-
zations contribute to classical political pluralism in the United States, in
which group politics is structured and organized by a set of traditional
organizations. This is pluralism in Weberian and Olsonian terms. The
consequence of new technology is evolution toward a kind of pluralism
less easily recognizable in those terms. The cases suggest that it is too soon
to identify in any detail the features of the information regime that will
one day condense out of this latest information revolution. But, as past
regimes do, it will surely feature new organizational structures adapted
to the state of information and communication.

225 OMB Watch, “Speaking Up in the Internet Age: Use and Value of Constituent E-mail
and Congressional Web Sites,” December 1998, http://http://www.ombwatch.org/
ombpubs.html.

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