Page 31 - Information and American Democracy Technology in the Evolution of Political Power

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Information and Political Change
in American political development. A remarkable and widely overlooked
element of the Federalist–Anti-Federalist debate involves informational
complexity and institutional arrangements. Considering this debate sets
the stage for evaluating the properties of information and their influence
on U.S. political development from the founding era on. In the tran-
sition from an elitist political system with highly circumscribed citizen
engagement in the early nineteenth century to a majoritarian democracy
where power was wielded through large coalitions based on broad citizen
involvement among white men, I suggest, is evidence of the first major
reconstitution of political information. Another is associated with the
evolution of the modern, group-based, pluralistic political system.
Transitions are revealing because they expose important underlying
causal mechanisms that may be obscured in times of stasis. History will
undoubtedly record the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries
as a period of marked transition fueled by new communication and
information capacities. One theme of this book is how the revolution
in information technology provides an opportunity to explore contem-
porary and historical connections between information and features of
democracy. We have the Internet to thank for directing our attention to
an old and fundamental phenomenon, one as old as Madisonian ideas
about the extended republic and the advantages of a federal nation over
a confederation of small states.
This perspective is broadly akin to scholarship in economics dealing
with information and organizational structure, although I do not employ
the formal assumptions of the economics of organization or the tenets of
rationalism. Rather, it is sufficient to assume simply that organizations
and institutions matter, that they tend to respond over time to changes
in opportunities and constraints, and that opportunities and constraints
are powerfully shaped by the nature of information and communication.
Commentators on American politics frequently identify democratic fail-
ings in the world of political communication – in the ways that mass
media present news, in the ways that candidates and government offi-
cials communicate with the public, in the privileged treatment accorded
the messages of certain groups, in citizens’ habits of political learning
and attention to public affairs. Critiques of the state of political commu-
nication tacitly accept a fundamental assumption that the evolution of
systems of communication exerts forces on the evolution of democracy.
This book explores that assumption.
The theoretical relationship between information and political tran-
sition that I seek to describe has been overlooked by most scholars who

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