Page 257 - Information and American Democracy Technology in the Evolution of Political Power

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Information, Equality, and Integration
specialists housed in legislatures, parties, interest groups, executive agen-
cies,themedia,anduniversities.Throughoutthepoliticalsystem,democ-
racy depends on the labor of many individuals whose chief political
qualification is knowledge and the possession of information. During
the twentieth century, Dahl observers, these “policy specialists” exerted
enormous if indirect effects on democracy through their influence on
agendas, attitudes and beliefs, the system of education, and the content
of policies.
The key point is that by itself the existence of policy specialists in a
political system does not necessarily lead to inequality. The reason is
that specialized knowledge and the possession of information are not
sufficient to create a class interest that might work in concert against
less privileged groups. Policy experts are not, in the Marxian sense, a
“class” because their interests are divergent and frequently at odds with
one another. However, as complexity in a political system increases, op-
portunities for experts and the well informed to exploit their informa-
tional advantage become widespread. Historically, complexity has been
the product of increasing scope of government: a greater number of pub-
lic policies and decreasing transparency in means–ends relationships.
Complexity undermines the capacity of the public to participate in the
formation of political agendas, engage in the policy process, and mon-
itor and ultimately control democratic institutions. Under such condi-
tions, experts derive a natural advantage over the public at large from
their command of information. Moreover, experts tend to be housed
in organizations and institutions of various sorts, since the mobiliza-
tion of specialized knowledge and information is a resource-intensive
task. Political organizations and institutions therefore become a locus
of information-based political inequality between the mass public and
information elites, who can function as if they constituted a traditional
class. This makes democracy vulnerable to drift toward a state of Pla-
tonic guardianship, in which the judgment of citizens is severed from the
decisions of elites. For Dahl, this is an equality problem of the highest
order:themorecomplexapolity,thegreaterthecontributionofinforma-
tion asymmetries to political inequality. In this view, the developments
in information and political organization since the second information
revolution described in Chapter 2 have created increasingly important
threats to political equality.
Dahl concludes Democracy and Its Critics by suggesting remedies. For
those who do not know the eminent philosopher to be an observer of
technology, his conclusions may come as a surprise. He believes the most

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