Page 34 - Information and American Democracy Technology in the Evolution of Political Power

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Overview of the Theory 17:40
treat technological change as a relevant variable. 31 A central but often
forgotten obstacle to the emergence of parties in the United States was
the need to solve communication problems associated with organizing
the electorate. The formation of civic associations in the same period re-
quired the solution of similar problems, as did the formation of interest
groups a century later. In these and other ways, information and commu-
nicationtechnologyhaveappearedasbitplayersinscholars’explanations
of some crucial crossroads in American political development, but they
have rarely held the intellectual spotlight.
One of the few theorists to interpret the evolution of democracy in
moreexplicitlyinformationaltermsisDahl,whounderstandsthehistori-
caldevelopmentofmodernpoliticalinstitutionsasdrivenbyinformation
problems embedded in demands for policy. He writes in Democracy and
Its Critics that a central feature of modern “polyarchy” was the creation
of “new institutions in order to adopt democracy to the growing need
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for the mobilization of specialized knowledge.” Dahl understands that
a central dynamic of the modern state is the development and exercise of
power associated with asymmetrically distributed information, and that
the organization of democratic power in response to public as well as
elite demands for public policy is regulated by the need for information.
Accounts of state building and public policy that focus exclusively on
public demands and on policy responses miss a vital fact that was well
known to the American founders: The state is more than an allocator of
services and values; it is an apparatus for assembling and managing the
political information associated with expressions of public will and with
public policy.
In what follows, I attempt to integrate Dahl’s premise with the hints
and clues about information left by Tocqueville, Truman, and others,
including James Madison and Max Weber. I believe that there are good
but underappreciated reasons that scholars have noticed the relevance
of information technology at what are arguably the two most impor-
tant historical turning points in American political development: the
rise of party-based majoritarian politics and the evolution of group-
based political pluralism. My aim is to explore what integration might be
possible between those two developmental milestones and the present,
using information as the nexus. I should add that in so doing, it is not

31 JohnAldrich,WhyParties?TheOriginandTransformationofPoliticalPartiesinAmerica
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
32 Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics, p. 338.

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