Page 56 - Information and American Democracy Technology in the Evolution of Political Power

P1: IPI/IBE/IRR/GYQ
August 13, 2002
0 521 80067 6
CY101-Bimber
10:39
CY101-02
The Information Theory of The Federalist
and communication has largely escaped notice. An important part of
the response to the size objection comes from Hamilton in 84, who ob-
serves that in the smallest democracies of just the sort that Montesquieu
and the Anti-Federalists advocate, important obstacles still exist to the
kind of direct, mutual observation between citizens and government that
Cato and Centinel presuppose. In neither small nor large democracies,
Hamilton notes, can citizens and government officials exchange infor-
mation directly and fully. Choosing Montgomery County as an example,
he points out that even in a jurisdiction of this size, the flow of political
information requires informed citizens to rely upon “the public prints,”
correspondence, and communication with others if they are to attend to
the affairs of government. Less-informed citizens must in turn rely upon
the better-informed. Therefore, political communication and the flow
of information will always be mediated, even in the smallest of states.
Establishing the principle of mediated information flow, regardless of
the size of government, lays the foundation for overcoming the problem
of scale.
For Hamilton, the mediation of political information is more than a
technicalnecessity.Itispoliticallydesirablebecauseitpermitsthefiltering
and aggregation of local communication, as well as the building of larger
views and a synthetic body of national-scale political information. The
informational tasks of central government are to aggregate information
in such a way that a useful synthesis results, in which the informational
whole is greater and wiser than the sum of the individual facts about
local problems. In the construction of a national view of problems, it is
useful that some local details recede into the background – a point of
view that was an anathema to Anti-Federalists.
One step in the process of mediating and synthesizing information
involves elected officials learning about problems outside their own con-
stituencies.HereMadisontakesuptheargument: “Whilstafewrepresen-
tatives, therefore, from each State, may bring with them a due knowledge
of their own state, every representative will have much information to
11
acquire concerning all the other States.” Hamilton claims that the state
governments have an important role to play in the flow of information
becausetheycanserveasinformationaggregators,standingbetweenlocal
problems and the larger national view. In the proposed system of govern-
ment, local information is to be assembled into state-level information
in the state governments. The state governments would then bring to the

11
The Federalist, p. 381.
39