Page 55 - Information and American Democracy Technology in the Evolution of Political Power

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Information Revolutions
especially on the capacity of the public to observe and understand gov-
ernment, and to assimilate adequate information to assert democratic
control.
Samuel Bryan pursues the idea that information problems infect
the public as well as elected officials. Multiplying representatives in a
national-scale legislature undermines the transparency of government
for citizens, he believes, creating complexity that will overwhelm citizens
and render their efforts at participation and accountability ineffective.
In one of the more far-sighted Anti-Federalist documents, Bryan anti-
cipates certain twentieth-century thought on accountability and divided
control:
The highest responsibility is to be attained in a simple structure of
government, for the great body of the people never steadily attend
to the operations of government, and for want of due information
are liable to be imposed upon. If you complicate the plan by various
orders, the people will be perplexed and divided in their sentiment
about the source of abuses or misconduct; some will impute it to
thesenate,otherstothehouseofrepresentatives,andsoon,thatthe
interposition of the people may be rendered imperfect or perhaps
wholly abortive. 9

Simpler, unitary government, Bryan believes, facilitates the acquisition
of “due information” on the part of the public, and therefore improves
accountability. If the information associated with government is less
complex and more straightforward, then “whenever the people feel a
grievance, they cannot mistake the authors, and will apply the remedy
with certainty and effect, discarding them at the next election.” 10 For
Anti-Federalists such as Bryan, Lee, and Clinton, representation suc-
ceeds in proportion to the particularity and specificity of information
linking citizens with government; in other words, the need to avoid in-
tractable complexity in political information helps set upper bounds on
the manageable size of democratic government. Madisonian multipli-
cation of interests at the societal level, they believe, creates insuperable
information problems at the level of the state and in the relationship
between state and civil society.
Publius has answers for this challenge, although they are not orga-
nized in a single place in The Federalist. Like the Anti-Federalist recourse
to matters of information, the Federalist understanding of information

9 10
Ibid., p. 141. Ibid.
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