Page 42 - Information and American Democracy Technology in the Evolution of Political Power

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The Empirical Picture 17:40
be acquired by citizens, up until the point where marginal costs match
marginal value. Empirical verification of this apparently straightforward
model has been highly problematic, however, especially when it is framed
in terms of longitudinal variation in citizens’ information environments.
It is important that a theoretical account of information and politi-
cal change take up this problem as a counterpart to organizational-level
matters. My approach involves a psychological perspective on political
information that stands in contrast to instrumental conceptions of in-
formation as a rationally consumed good. Following work in political
psychology, I posit that the informed citizen in the age of the Internet
is not a rational actor, nor necessarily even one who pursues short-cuts
and satisficing strategies in lieu of exhaustive and thorough information-
gathering. Instead, informed citizenship involves the information-rich
growing even richer as the cost of information falls, while those poor in
information remain so. In practice, people should acquire information
in so-called biased ways that support existing beliefs rather than reducing
uncertainty. Most important, their consumption of information should
occur in ways that are highly contingent on context and the stimulus
provided by elites and organizations.
This view leads to the hypothesis that in the cycle of information rev-
olutions and regimes, including contemporary developments, changes
in the nature of political information should typically exert little di-
rect influence on levels of citizen engagement. As a force in democracy,
therefore, information should work somewhat differently at the level of
organizations and the level of individuals. Information revolutions, in-
cluding the present one, should have profound and direct consequences
for organizations and political structure, but only indirect, less tangi-
ble consequences for politics at the level of individual political engage-
ment. The effects of changes in information, I argue, are concentrated on
political form through an increasing independence of political structure
from traditional economic and social structures.

THE EMPIRICAL PICTURE

To explore this model empirically, I draw on evidence from several re-
search projects. This evidence is both quantitative and qualitative in na-
ture. The quantitative evidence comes from survey research oriented
toward issues of individual-level behavior. It includes data from the
American National Election Studies and several proprietary surveys of
my own based on national probability samples. The survey data allow

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