Page 76 - Information and American Democracy Technology in the Evolution of Political Power

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The Rise of Majoritarianism
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Congress had passed between 1789 and 1791. The executive branch was
even less well developed, since no “bureaucracy” in the modern sense of
the word existed until late in the century. Apart from the Navy and War
departments, the only cabinet departments until midcentury were State
and Treasury. Interior was added in 1849, but no others until Reconstruc-
tion. Prior to the Civil War, government agencies were thinly distributed,
comprising the Coast Survey, the Steamboat Inspection Service (the sole
regulatory agency), and land and customs offices. It was what Stephen
Skowronek calls “a serviceable but unassuming government ... [that]
provided promotional and support services for the state governments
and left the substantive tasks of governing to these regional units.” 69
PriortotheCivilWar,therewerecomparativelyfeworganizedpolitical
voices in the polity apart from parties and abolitionist groups to add to
the complexity or heterogeneity of political communication. The age of
major corporations and the union had not yet arrived, explicitly political
interest groups had yet to engage government or the public on a large
scale, and “lobbying” was yet to develop as a normal practice.
All this meant that the numbers of governmental and organized pub-
lic actors involved in the communication of political information, as
well as the number of issues to which they addressed themselves, were
small – far smaller than they would be half a century later. This set of
conditions, including the press–postal medium, made dominance over
political communication by the parties straightforward, especially given
the absence of institutional competitors in the realm of information,
such as national religious institutions, or an organized aristocracy. These
characteristics of political communication that emerged from the devel-
opmentsofthe1820sand’30sconstitutedaninformationregime,onethat
would prove dominant and stable for about five decades. Its chief features
were the simple, spatially organized structure of political information it-
self, opportunities for national-scale communication dependent on and
restricted mainly to newspapers, and a particular form of political orga-
nization, the party, exploiting and dominating those opportunities.
During the existence of this regime, other technological developments
eventually extended the new communications capacity. These included
the steamboat, which had first been used commercially in 1807 on
the Hudson, but which did not expand into commercial importance
until midcentury, and then the railroad, which became commercially
68
Roger Davidson and Walter Oleszek, Congress and Its Members, 7th ed. (Washington,
D.C.: CQ Press, 2000).
69
Skowronek, Building a New American State, p. 23.
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