Page 22 - Information and American Democracy Technology in the Evolution of Political Power

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Information and Political Change
or learning at the individual level. It does not appear, at least so far, that
new technology leads to higher aggregate levels of political engagement.
The failure to identify major effects has a great deal in common with
the “limited effects” tradition in media studies dating back to the work
of Paul Lazersfeld in the 1940s. That literature sought and failed to find
substantial direct effects of mass media on public opinion and other de-
pendent variables common in the study of political behavior. Its failure
to account for processes such as agenda setting and framing was key, and
this provides clues in the search for effects of contemporary information
technology. It seems clear so far that information technology does not
exert large direct effects on traditional participation and public opinion,
but it is far from clear what other effects might exist.
The second finding in scholarship on information technology and
politics is the existence of the so-called digital divide, a gap between
those “on line” and “off line” that falls along socioeconomic, racial, and
genderlines.Theclaimisthataccesstothenewinformationenvironment
is decidedly unequal, and moreover, it is unequal in ways that exacerbate
traditional divisions and inequalities in society. The evidence for this
effect is now substantial and unequivocal. However, viewed in light of
the limited participation effects finding, the implications of the digital
divide are less than certain.
The third finding from research so far is the presence of novel forms
of collective action. A number of descriptive case studies – the earli-
est dating to the mid-1990s – have documented instances of unusual
groupings of citizens organizing and using information technology in
pursuit of political objectives. The emphasis in these studies is the ca-
pacity of political entrepreneurs to overcome resource barriers by using
comparatively inexpensive information technology. These events suggest
interesting developments in the nature of collective action, the limited
participation effects and digital divide notwithstanding, and the case of
the Libertarians and the FDIC falls into this category.
This book begins where these three strands of literature leave off, in
an effort both to advance our understanding of their findings and to
integrate them into a larger picture. The book addresses the following
questions: What do stories such as the Know Your Customer protest
mean? Will similar developments lead to political transition as well as
technical change? What do the possibilities portend for how scholars
theorize about politics? Increasingly, the important intellectual tasks as-
sociated with information technology and democracy involve synthe-
sizing a larger causal picture across events and cases in order to assess

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