Information Technology and the “New” Politics:
Brief Remarks on Political Change

August 24, 2001

Bruce Bimber

Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, and

Director of the Center for Information Technology and Society

University of California, Santa Barbara

Santa Barbara, California 93106 USA

805.893.3860

bimber@polsci.ucsb.edu

bimber

Introduction

Many observers of technology and politics have used the concepts “cyberpolitics,” “e-governance” and so on to describe a new form of politics facilitated by information technology (e.g. Jordan, 2001; Choucri, 2000; Hill and Hughes, 1998). These terms and the speculations about politics associated with them suggest that political phenomena associated with information technology are in some important sense different from politics associated with older media and means of communication. This idea poses an important question with far-reaching theoretical and normative implications: Does technology that is demonstrably new and different from what went before lead also to fundamentally different politics?

Answering this question fully must await the passage of time, just as it took many years for the consequences of television for politics to become clear, and many decades for the consequences of the industrial revolution to be intelligible. From the experience of the first half-decade or so of information technology as a political phenomenon, however, a few important aspects of this issue are now clear. One is that in politics and governance, the use of contemporary information technologies is often mutually dependent upon use of older media. Another is that the many consequences of new technologies for politics are multi-dimensional and sometimes at odds with one another. These properties of interdependence and multi-dimensionality undermine the idea that a distinct, coherent new phenomenon is at hand. They recommend avoiding short-hand terms such as “cyberpolitics,” which may mistakenly imply meaningful separation between “new” and “old” politics. They also illuminate the importance of avoiding the incorrect inference that fundamental principles of human behavior change concurrently with changing technology.

In this brief essay I draw on findings from a two-year study of information technology in US politics to explore the question of whether new technology is producing new politics. My main thesis is that information technology has many potentially important consequences for politics and governance, but interdependence and multi-dimensionality confound efforts to categorize and label these in straightforward ways, and they undermine attempts to assert that technology enhances or undermine political equality or advances or frustrates democratization. My study is a multi-method project involving several national surveys in the US based on probability samples, an experiment in four cities in which citizens came to research facilities and viewed political information on the web, and a set of qualitative case studies based on about six dozen interviews with officials of interest groups, campaigns, political parties, and US government offices. The complete results of that study will be reported at length elsewhere. [1] In this paper I draw on some of the findings to illustrate properties of interdependence and multi-dimensionality.

Interdependence of New and Old Means of Communication

In the realms of elections and policy-making, it should go without saying that information technology does not exist in a vacuum with respect to older means of communication and persuasion. Contemporary information technologies of the web, electronic mail, instant messaging, and various synchronous and asynchronous multi-user environments exist alongside fax technology and mass mailing techniques as well as television and radio, not to mention telephones, networks of volunteers, and the personal activities of lobbyists and other political professionals. One of the key questions in analyzing the consequences of any new medium involves the issue of displacement versus supplementation of older technologies by new. To what extent is the use of new technology causing the abandonment or displacement of older technologies?

So far, the answer is that in the American case a good deal of the use of contemporary information technology in politics has supplemented rather displaced direct mail, television, and other traditional means of communication. In the area of policy advocacy, virtually all interest groups rely upon web sites and electronic mail to communicate with members and interested citizens and to organize collective efforts at policy advocacy. Some maintain sophisticated databases of hundreds of thousands of citizen names along with details of their policy interests. The groups use this information to make highly targeted solicitations to citizens for action. Rather than sending a mass message to every citizen interested in any environmental issue each time an interest group takes a position on a single issue, for example, the most savvy groups make many, smaller, highly targeted appeals to just those citizens with an interest in the particular environmental issue of concern. The Internet provides a powerful range of capabilities to make such appeals at comparatively low cost.

In my study, I examined about the activities of about a dozen interest groups through case studies. [2] I found that in their appeals using electronic mail, groups often ask citizens to communicate with elected officials not via the Internet but using traditional means: phone calls, faxes, letters, or appearance at rallies or marches. These organizations recognize that traditional communication by citizens is typically more powerful, since public officials discount cheaply-sent electronic mail. The Internet technology that works so well for information management and the distribution of calls for collective action from interest groups to citizens is much weaker when it comes to communication from citizens to government. My research shows that the capacity of new technology to displace old is limited by the economics of communication and “cheap-talk.” Internet-based political techniques are indeed powerful but they often depend upon traditional modes of communication in the larger process of policy advocacy.

I also examined the arena of election campaigns, where I arrived at similar findings. In the 2000 presidential campaigns in the US, for example, virtually every major candidate dedicated a small but non-trivial effort to campaigning through the Internet. For underdog candidates such as Bill Bradley and John McCain, Internet operations were very important to overall strategy, especially in the early stages of the contest. As McCain reported in an interview with the author, the Internet “kept us alive.” [3] The largest campaign operations, those of George Bush and Al Gore, each involved about five full-time Internet staff reporting directly to the highest levels of the campaign organization.

In the interviews that I and my research team conducted, we learned that across presidential campaigns of all sizes, candidates operated on the assumption that no Internet technology could do what television and traditional mass media can: reach out and command the public’s attention regardless of citizens’ level of interest or intention to learn about politics.

The candidates found in 2000 that the Internet can serve an entirely different, complementary function to that of television: providing a means to engage people who are interested in the campaign and desirous of learning more or becoming involved. What many candidates in the elections of 1996 and 1998 had found a shortcoming of the Internet, its tendency to reach only supporters of a particular candidate, most 2000 campaign organizations exploited as an advantage. Candidates attempted to steer their supporters into their web sites in the hopes of interacting with them over time, soliciting volunteers and donors, and encouraging turnout on election day. The Gore campaign, for example, made a concerted effort of displaying the address of its web site on each side of the podium when the candidate spoke before a television audience. Its goal was to “drive” Gore supporters watching the candidate on television into the web site, which was not designed to persuade followers of Gore’s opponents to change their minds but to be attractive and engaging to citizens in the television audience already interested in Gore.

Television news and campaign advertising drives mass public attention. The utility of this form of communication is undiminished by the presence of the web, which serves another but different, useful function: tailoring “narrowcast” messages. The most sophisticated campaigns in 2000 inquired about citizens’ individual policy interests at their web sites, and then tailored what citizens saw to their own set of interests. A campaign could emphasizing its candidate’s position on just those issues of most importance to a citizen who had registered at the site. Rather than creating political attention as television can do, the web serves to engage and sustain those already attentive. In the electoral arena, the psychology of political attention and political learning dictate limits on the capacity of new technology to displace older technology, and this finding is consistent with a great deal of research on political psychology and learning (Delli Carpini and Keeter, 1986; Lodge, Tabor, and Galonsky, 1999; Neuman 1986; Sniderman, Brody, and Tetlock, 1991; Zaller, 1992).

Multi-dimensionality

The second major property of contemporary information technology as an influence on politics is multi-dimensionality. Clearly contemporary information technology is increasingly heterogeneous, offering many modes of communication and information management. However it is important to emphasize the absence of a priori reasons to expect that these various modes would all exert the same influence or necessarily even lead in any consistent set of directions. By the same token, the realm of politics and governance encompasses such a wide range of arenas and processes that there are few reasons to expect that the introduction of any one new mode of communication would exert the same kind of influence across the various arenas.

Multi-dimensionality is immediately apparent when one compares the effects of information technologies in American politics at the individual level, where consequences are small and likely inimical to political equality, with effects at the level of political organizations, where effects are large are mainly advantageous for political equality. US voter turnout has been declining for several decades and now ranks among the lowest of the world’s established democracies. Many observers have hoped that “cyberpolitics” might remedy that decline, by providing improved access to political information and communication. In conjunction many have also hoped that the information revolution might lead to increased levels of political knowledge and a closing of the gap between the most and least engaged citizens.

My survey research shows something quite different. Multi-variate regression analysis of data from my own surveys and the American National Election Study for 1996, 1998, and 2000 shows the Internet to have no effect on voter turnout. Even citizens who specifically obtained political information through the Internet were no more likely to vote than those who did not, when their comparatively high socioeconomic status is accounted for. Insofar as knowledge is concerned, the evidence strongly suggests that on the whole the Internet is increasing gaps between those who are engaged and well informed and those who are not. The Internet does so by differentially serving the interests and tastes of citizens with the most education and most prior engagement with politics. These findings lead to an overall observation that at the individual level, information technology is not ‘democratizing’ and may even undermine the state of political equality, even before one considers the problems of the digital divide.

At an even finer level of analytic detail, survey evidence shows how important it is to differentiate among features of the Internet, treating it not as a single phenomenon or unitary new form of communication but as a collection of sometimes quite disparate modes of communication with divergent consequences. Empirical research has only begun to explore this issue, but it is clear on theoretical grounds that electronic mail might have quite different influences on civic life than, say, web-based games or pornography, just as political information web sites are likely to have different effects than retail web sites. Lumping such disparate communication phenomena together is likely to gloss over important distinctions within the world of technology and civic life.

I have examined the relationships between various forms of Internet use, social interaction and social trust, using the 2000 General Social Survey (GSS) and as set of OLS regression models. This analysis shows little relationship between intensity of various forms of Internet use and variables for social engagement and trust. As others have recently reported – but in contrast to some early studies in the US – Internet use does not seem to make people more or less sociable or trusting of others (Kraut et al. 2001; Shaw, Kwak, and Holbert, 2001; Uslaner, 2000; Kavanaugh and Patterson 1998; Kraut et al., 1998). For instance, I examined GSS variables for hours of e-mail use per week, web use, chat room use, interactive gaming, and acquiring government information and local community information. In the cross-sectional analysis, none of these variables has any relationship on social trust, happiness, or variables for various social activities such as socializing with friends and family. On the other hand, I found a few small relationships when I examined very specific forms of Internet use and social engagement. Use of web-based chatrooms is negatively related to socializing with relatives. And intuitively enough, use of the web for religious information is negative related to socializing in bars or taverns, while viewing pornography on the Internet is positively related to bar socializing. The main conclusions from these findings are that individual-level effects of the Internet on social engagement are minor, and what effects do exist are highly granular and sometimes conflicting in their ultimate influence on aggregate concepts such as sociability, trust, and civic engagement.

Turning from individual-level questions to political organizations as the unit of analysis,

the situation becomes quite different. My interview-based case study analysis of interest groups, parties, campaign organizations, and various civic associations show that use information technology is exerting a number of important influences. It is restructuring how organizations operate and in some ways democratizing processes of collective action and political organizing. Within established organizations, information technology tends to flatten bureaucratic structures and make boundaries more porous. This facilitates collaborative decision-making, coalition-formation among organizations, and flexible adaptation by organizations to operate at national, regional, and local levels simultaneously. By lowering resource-related barriers, information technology enhances the capacity of peripheral, poorly endowed organizations to engage in politics alongside larger, richer organizations. Most importantly, the technology is aiding the formation of novel, ad hoc groups. Protests and rallies such as those targeting meetings of the World Trade Organization are readily facilitated by the new technology. In my own research, I analyzed several such US groups that involved collective action by tens of thousands of citizens in the absence of any established coordinating organizations.

The presence of such groups violate some of the chief tenets of scholarship on pluralistic politics in the US, namely that collective action typically requires formal organization, institutionalized leadership, and financial resources (Cigler and Loomis, 1998; Moe, 1980; Walker 1992). The reason for this discrepancy is that most scholarship on interest groups is premised on the existence of high information costs and the availability only of comparatively centralized forms of communication. One implication of these developments is the possible decay of some of the capacity of traditionally powerful elites to dominate political communication and collective action. To the extent that the dominance of traditional elites is weakened, information technology may tend to broaden and ‘democratize’ the population of political organizations that give form to politics, advancing the state of political equality.

The conclusions that one draws about the effects of information technology on politics depend therefore on the level of analysis in which one is interested and the details of the technology and political processes of interest. My own research provides a good deal of support for the proposition that information technology may alter certain aspects of politics in large ways, but very little support so far for the idea that a coherent, distinct new category of politics is emerging that could warrant any single label. It is interesting to note that it is often the most sophisticated and well-developed political undertakings that use now new and old technologies alongside one another, in a mutually dependent way. It is not simply the incomplete diffusion of the technology or the presence of a digital divide that limit politics by new means. For more fundamental theoretical reasons, politics by new means is inseparable from politics by old means.

In the long term, advances in technology will indeed likely render obsolete some traditional modes of communication – faxes and even direct mail are good candidates. And as technological convergence occurs, the physical instruments of television, newspapers, the web, and other communications services will grow less and less distinct. As objects, the distinction between these have already begun to fade. Yet the socio-psychology and economics of communication itself do not appear to change as rapidly or as qualitatively as the physical artifacts associated with them.