Page 249 - Information and American Democracy Technology in the Evolution of Political Power

P2: GCV/IRP
P1: IPH/IRP/IVO
August 14, 2002
CY101-Bimber
19:12
0 521 80067 6
CY101-06
Information, Equality, and Integration
and comparatively few restrictions on paid political advertising in the
United States. The proper question is not whether specific developments
in the United States have been replicated elsewhere, but whether the same
basic relationship between information and political change seems also
to be at work.
The first conclusion one draws from examining the contemporary
state of information technology and politics globally is that the nation
where the Internet was created in the late 1960s and 1970s is among the
nations with the deepest incorporation of new technology into politics.
In most other countries, the far slower rate of diffusion of technology
to citizens limits the capacity of political systems to adopt new means
for communication and information management. At the turn of the
century, for example, Internet access across Eastern Europe, the Middle
East, Asia, and South America was well under 10 percent, while it was
three to five times higher across Western Europe, Scandinavia, and North
America. According to one global survey, at a time when Internet access
in the United States was about 40 percent, it was about 15 percent in
GermanyandJapan,and1percentinMexico,Argentina,andCosta Rica. 2
A medium that was viable for political communication among a substan-
tial fraction of the population in the United States was therefore below
a critical mass of citizens in many other countries. And in no country,
even those with higher rates of citizen access (such as Sweden), has the
political system incorporated information technology more deeply than
in the United States through its parties, interest groups, mass media, and
state offices.
Pippa Norris has shown that several factors explain the varying na-
tional rates of incorporation of technology, including socioeconomics
and level of economic development, the presence of technology-based
3
industries, and culture. The variation in extent of state control over
communication systems also regulates the evolution of new information
environments in politics. In China, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Thailand,
for instance, comparatively strong state dominance of telecommunica-
tionshasclearlysloweddevelopmentofnewtechnologyaspoliticalmedia
compared with the United States and other nations. 4

2 Pippa Norris, Digital Divide: Civic Engagement, Information Poverty and the Internet
Worldwide (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
3 Ibid.
4 Peter Lovelock, “The Asian NII Experience,” paper presented at the INET Confer-
ence, Kuala Lampur, Malaysia, June 24–27, 1997, http://www.isoc.org/isoc/whatis/
conferences/inet/97/proceedings/E3/E3 2.HTM.

232