Page 258 - Information and American Democracy Technology in the Evolution of Political Power

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Dahl’s Equality Proposition
promising remedy, with which he concludes the book, is “telecommuni-
22
cations.” Dahl argues that information technology offers several means
to reduce political inequality. The evolution of information technology
increases accessibility to information about the political agenda, which
in turn facilitates public participation. New technology also expands the
means for citizens to contribute to political processes. It makes obser-
vation and monitoring of public officials easier for the public at large.
As telecommunication technology expands the flow of information and
communication, it makes government more transparent, and the more
transparent government is, the smaller the advantage information elites
enjoy with respect to the public at large. One general consequence of
technological development, then, may be to diminish the third class of
resource-based obstacles to political equality.
This argument does not depend on the simplistic view that all citi-
zens will avail themselves of new possibilities for political learning and
engagement in a polity increasingly rich with information technology –
or even that most citizens will do so. Dahl’s claim is in general agreement
with Anthony Downs’s assertion that “any concept of democracy based
on an electorate of equally well-informed citizens presupposes that men
behave irrationally.” 23 Rational citizens choose to delegate some infor-
mation acquisition tasks as long as information is not free; therefore,
information will be asymmetrically distributed among perfectly ratio-
nal citizens. Dahl suggests that, in practice, only a subset of citizens will
likely take advantage of the information richness made possible by new
technology. But this engaged and informed subset of citizens can form
an adequate check and counterbalance against the power of professional,
institutionalized information elites.
This argument echoes the old debate between Federalists and Anti-
Federalists over political complexity and institutional arrangements. The
late eighteenth century provided for American political thinkers no ready
examples of complex, highly articulated Weberian bureaucracy vested
with policy-making power, nor examples of a policy intelligentsia. At the
time of the founding, the colonies had no mass media, policy think tanks,
parties, interest groups, nor tradition of professional staff in legislatures,
and only a few institutions of higher education. The protoclass of policy
specialists of concern to Dahl could not have been a consideration in the
calculus of constitutional engineering at the time of the founding. For
22
Ibid., p. 339.
23
Anthony Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Harper and Brothers,
1957), p. 221.
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