Page 248 - Information and American Democracy Technology in the Evolution of Political Power

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A Brief Comparison with Other Nations
to command. In these ways at least, the flow of information is central
to political structure and political behavior. Not only is information a
tool and resource used by political actors in a strategic or psychological
sense, its characteristics and qualities help define political actors them-
selves. This is how changes in information arising from technological
development can bear so directly on the structure of politics.

A BRIEF COMPARISON WITH OTHER NATIONS

It is intriguing to inquire how well these conclusions might explain de-
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velopments in other nations. Seeing whether a country-specific theory
is applicable in other nations would certainly be the next logical step
in testing the theory. Since the information revolution is clearly global
or nearly global in scope, one can reasonably expect that the theory of
information revolutions described here might apply in Europe, Asia, or
South America. At the same time, there is no reason to suspect that tech-
nological developments would exert precisely the same forces and result
in precisely the same outcomes across nations. Indeed, one of the lessons
of the history of information revolutions in the United States is that so-
ciotechnological developments such as the postal–press system are partly
the product of politics. For this reason alone, we should expect politically
relevant technologies to evolve differently across nations. No less impor-
tant is the fact that sociotechnological developments do not determine
political outcomes, but instead simply alter the matrix of opportunities
and costs associated with political intermediation, mobilization, and the
organization of politics.
How altered opportunities and costs play out is a function of non-
technological factors: the state of political participation, the identity and
forms of political intermediaries, the structure of institutions of the state,
and so on. The fact that the postal–press system obviously contributed
to the development of the party system in the United States does not
mean that the press, post office, or combination of the two needs to have
done so in other countries with different social structures and institu-
tions, different geographies, different systems of franchise, and so on.
Similarly, the powerful effects of television on American political evolu-
tion are attributable not only to inherent features of the technology but
to features of American politics that differentiate it from that of other na-
tions, in particular, the comparatively weak parties, the primary system,

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I leave aside questions of the effect of the information revolution on international
relations.
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