Page 39 - Information and American Democracy Technology in the Evolution of Political Power

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Information and Political Change
to alter organizational structures. The result is a diminished role on many
fronts for traditional organizations in politics. The pluralism of the 1950s
and 1960s was a politics of bargaining among institutionalized interests.
That changed in the 1970s and 1980s to a pluralism of more atomistic
issue groups, less inclined and able at elite bargaining and more tightly
focused on so-called single issues. The accelerated pluralism of the 1990s
and2000sincreasinglyinvolvessituationsinwhichthestructureofgroup
politics is organized around not interests or issues, but rather events and
the intensive flow of information surrounding them.
This progression from interest groups to issue groups to event groups
does not imply that the former organizational form is displaced entirely.
It should involve, rather, the loosening of certain organizational bound-
aries and structures and an increasing heterogeneity of forms working
alongside one another, as we see in Chapter 4. As in previous infor-
mation regimes, political influence in the fourth regime should remain
biased toward those with the best command of political information.
The contemporary information revolution should make traditional, bu-
reaucratically structured organizations of all kinds less able to dominate
political information – this is the central motor of political change.
In this way, it is possible to array contemporary developments with
historical ones. The first information revolution made national-scale
political information available for the first time, which contributed to
centralized, hierarchical organizations serving as the basis for collective
action in politics. In the second information revolution, national-scale
political information grew complex and costly, which led to the rise of
decentralized, specialized, and bureaucratized organizations as the basis
for collective action. The third information revolution created a modern
tension between mass politics and pluralism, but left major, highly in-
stitutionalized organizational forms in a position of dominance. In the
contemporary revolution, national-scale information is growing abun-
dant, but no less complex than ever. The result should be a weakening
of the organizational structures of the previous regimes. This sequence
is summarized in Figure 1.1.
One of the major problems facing social scientists concerned with
American democracy is the state of citizenship and levels of civic en-
gagement. By many traditional measures, these are in decline, as the
literatures on social capital, public opinion, voting participation, and the
public sphere indicate. On the other hand, critics of declinist arguments
have posited alternative interpretations of the data, based on new forms
of engagement and changes in the meaning of citizenship. Many have

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