Page 259 - Information and American Democracy Technology in the Evolution of Political Power

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Information, Equality, and Integration
Anti-Federalists, informational complexity was indeed a threat, as we saw
in Chapter 2, but complexity arose simply from the country’s size and
diversity of interests. For the Federalists, complexity could be remedied
by intermediation and the layered aggregation of information through
the states. To Publius, more information was indeed better, and a larger
scope of government superior at judicious decision-making.
History has endorsed the Federalists’ position on information in the
most basic sense, as well as their positions on a number of other matters.
At the same time, the Anti-Federalists’ concern with threats to repre-
sentation and public control arising from complexity have grown more
pertinent over time, as Dahl’s argument suggests. The original American
question of political complexity concerned the survival of central gov-
ernment in the face of heterogeneous citizen interests, and for that time
and place the Anti-Federalists misjudged how political communication
could work. Yet, as Dahl points out, by a century later, institution build-
ing and increasing scope of public policy have returned us to matters of
complexity and lack of transparency in government. The contemporary
complexity question concerns the capacity of citizens to retain control
of political processes in the face of institutionalized policy elites whose
power derives from dominance over information.
That Dahl would approach this problem with a technological remedy
is provocative. Serious political thinkers are rightly dismissive of techno-
logical solutions to political problems. Yet the conclusions of Chapters 3
and 4 of this book about new structures for collective action and mo-
bilization are supportive of Dahl’s technology-centric proposition. The
mechanisms of postbureaucratic organization are precisely those that
Dahl claims might diminish the influence of institutionalized elites in
politics. As information grows more abundant and decentralized, and
as it moves more readily across the boundaries of organizations, the ca-
pacity of a narrow class of elites to exploit information asymmetries to
their advantage decays. The capacity of the Libertarian Party to inform
and mobilize large numbers of citizens about an obscure but relevant
policy change constructed by the banking industry and its regulators is
among the best examples one might imagine. So too is the new capacity
of environmental organizations to distribute highly specific and timely
political information to citizens with a particular policy concern but who
are not otherwise “members” of a political organization. Such cases, as
well as the brief illustrations above from other nations, endorse the idea
that the contemporary information revolution is undermining one form
of political inequality.

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