Page 27 - Information and American Democracy Technology in the Evolution of Political Power

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Information and Political Change
mathematicalwaywouldindeedproveacenterpieceoftwentieth-century
digital theory, 250 years after Locke.
For the purposes of the present inquiry, I begin with a modern defi-
nition of information, based on the Oxford English Dictionary: “knowl-
edge communicated concerning some particular fact, subject, or event.”
Knowledge about facts, subjects, or events is inextricably bound to vir-
tually every aspect of democracy. Such knowledge may concern the in-
terests, concerns, preferences, or intentions of citizens as individuals or
collectives. It may also concern the economic or social state of communi-
ties or society, or the actions and intentions of government officials and
candidates for office. In what follows, political information constitutes
any knowledge relevant to the working of democratic processes.
In his classic The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion, John Zaller
observes that the content of elite discourse, such as claims about the state
of the world from party leaders and editorial positions of newspapers,
19
contains information, but it is not “just information.” Because political
discourse is the product of values and selectivity as much as verifiably
“objective” observations, it comprises a mix of information and other
factors. For my purposes this definition too narrowly constrains the
concept of information by associating it with “truth” and “objectivity.”
I assume that when a political actor communicates a personal statement
about the world containing a mix of facts and values, that actor is simply
communicating a package of information, some of it dealing with “facts”
and some of it with his or her values and predispositions. Some “facts”
may even be wrong, but they can be communicated nonetheless and
they constitute information. 20

“A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” Bell System Technical Journal 27
(July 1948): 379–423, and (October 1948): 623–656.
19 John Zaller, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge
University Press, 1991), p. 13.
20 That a recipient of communication may have difficulty distinguishing the facts and
values in a message or may be unable to verify truth claims does not change the fact
that information in a broad sense has been transmitted, perhaps with a high level
of uncertainty associated with it. How much “true” information recipients extract
from a message is a function of their own sophistication and their knowledge of
the person communicating. Imagine, for instance, a situation where a candidate for
office broadcasts a factually false message that his opponent is a communist, or an
opponent of civil rights, or an adulterer. If a voter, believing the message, abandons
her support for the accused candidate and votes instead for the accuser, there can be
no doubt that communication has occurred and that information – albeit containing
a false claim – has been transmitted. Whether the information in a message is “true”
or “objective,” and whether in this case the accuser sincerely believes his propaganda,
is a separate question from the existence of information and communication.

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