Page 62 - Information and American Democracy Technology in the Evolution of Political Power

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The Information Theory of The Federalist
Federalist and their Anti-Federalist opponents could agree. They parted
company on the question of precisely how institutional structure affects
the state of democratic information. The Federalists saw connections
between heterogeneity and the disclosure of information that the Anti-
Federalists did not, and they anticipated that the flow of political infor-
mation would be mediated and aggregated.
The issue of complexity and the most appropriate institutional ar-
rangements for dealing with it therefore emerges as one of the major
themesinthisdebateaboutpoliticalinformation.ItappearedtotheAnti-
Federalists that the informational tasks of governing could quickly grow
complex – too complex, they felt, for a large state to succeed. Publius’s
emphasis on aggregation and mediation, on the other hand, reflects his
quite different understanding of the problem. Not only can complexity
be managed, but it should also be embraced because broader patterns
and perspectives may emerge from it.
This central Federalist conception can be summarized in the thesis
that the state of democracy is partly a function of the ways that political
structure affects the disclosure, mediation, and aggregation of political
information. From the perspective of the twenty-first century, this idea
perhaps gives the impression of being self-evident. But like much of
what Publius wrote, it was hardly so in an age before the rise of mass
media, political parties, and interest groups, and before the creation of
the First Amendment protections for information. The Federalists could
not foresee how this relationship would play out over time. The structure
and mediation of information would one day be dominated by private
political organizations as well as formal institutions of government;
the identities of information aggregators would themselves change as
the complexity and cost of information changed; and the mass public it-
selfwouldonedaybecomeinvolvedintimatelyintheflowofinformation.
But the Federalist thesis serves as a useful foundation for evaluating the
coevolution of information and political structure from the founding
period on. It also reminds us that important contemporary develop-
ments in information and politics driven by technology have conceptual
roots in early American political thought. Most important, in theoretical
terms, this proposition suggests the possibility of a causal relationship
between properties of information and features or qualities of democ-
racy. Going a step further than Publius, one can posit that features of
information – such as degree of complexity or level of accessibility and
extent of its distribution – might vary over time, and that this variation
might be connected in some way with political structure and with the

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