| Bruce Bimber's Book, Information and American Democracy: Technology and the Evolution of Political Power (Cambridge University Press, 2003), has won the 2003-04 Don K. Price Award for best book on science, technology, and politics published in the last year. The Don K. Price Award is given annually by the American Political Science Association's Science, Technology, and Environmental Politics Section. Professor Bimber received his award at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association in Chicago, September 3-5, 2004. The formal citation reads as follows: Information and American Democracy explores the complex and subtle relationship between developments in information and communication technology on the one hand and processes of political representation and influence on the other. Bimber situates the Internet in an historical sequence of "information regimes" dating back to the founding of the U.S. The theoretical leverage provided by this framework allows him to deflate the hype about recent events without blinding him to their novelty, notably the emergence of "postbureaucratic" political organizations and the associated incoherence of the public sphere. Bimber's research is deep and broad, qualitative and quantitative, longitudinal and cross-sectional. Given the complexity and dynamism of his object of inquiry, Bimber is appropriately humble in his conclusions; indeed, one of his book's great merits is that it defines a compelling agenda for further research. The framework and findings of Information and American Democracy are nonetheless worthy of careful scrutiny by any political scientist interested in any policy-making process, grappling as it does with such a fundamental and inportant set of questions. Committee: David M. Hart, George Mason University (Chair) Jeffrey Hart, University of Indiana Walter A Rosenbaum, University of Florida |