Page 36 - Information and American Democracy Technology in the Evolution of Political Power

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Overview of the Theory 17:40
The first information regime in the United States emerged from an
information revolution during the Jacksonian democratization. It was
facilitated by the creation of the first national-scale system for commu-
nicating political information, namely, the remarkable U.S. Postal Ser-
vice and the equally remarkable American newspaper industry, which
Tocqueville himself believed to be the most vibrant in the world by the
1830s. National flow of political information was largely impossible in
the decades after the founding. Its absence had blocked the develop-
ment of new parties prior to the 1830s. Those parties that arose in the
mid-nineteenth century were the final component of this information
regime, an adaptation in part to the opportunities and constraints for
the flow of information created by the postal service and newspaper sys-
tems. Beneath America’s majoritarian politics of the nineteenth century
was a distinguishing set of arrangements for the distribution of polit-
ical information. These arrangements would eventually be superceded
by others; but for a half to three-quarters of a century, they defined the
majority of possibilities for large-scale political communication and civic
engagement in the United States.
The second American information revolution led to an information
regime that lasted into the middle of the twentieth century. That revolu-
tion was a product of the industrial revolution and the growing American
state, which transformed the landscape of political information requisite
to politics. Information became enormously complex and highly dif-
ferentiated between about 1880 and 1920 because the number of policy
issuesonthenationalagendamultiplied,asdidthenumberofprivateand
public actors engaged in the exchange of information. Such complexity
favored a new form of organization adapted to the management and flow
of specialized and increasingly costly information: the organized interest
group. Though this new form of organization would eventually rise to
prominence after the New Deal, interest-group politics of the twentieth
century reflected and rested upon the new set of informational charac-
teristics that emerged at the turn of the century. Interest groups can be
understood as information specialists that prevailed over generalists (the
parties) in some of the central communication functions in politics.
The pluralism connected with the second information regime per-
sisted throughout the twentieth century, but was affected by a third,
transitional revolution during the period of the 1950s–1970s involving
broadcasting. The broadcast information revolution had two distinct
phases. In the first, the mass audience for communication tended to
weaken party organizations as central players in campaigning and at the

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