Can Technology Enhance Democracy? The Doubters' Answer
Philip Howard
Department of Sociology, Northwestern University
p-howard@nwu.edu

Book Review Essay::

Anthony Wilhelm, Democracy in a Digital Age: Challenges to Political Life in Cyberspace (New York, NY: Routledge, 2000). ), 272 pages, $24.99

Elaine Kamarck and Joseph Nye, Democracy.com? Governance in a Networked World (New York: Hollis Publishing, 1999). 225 pages, $17.95

Richard Davis, The Web of Politics: The Internet's Impact on the American Political System (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1999). 224 pages, $18.95

The first books about role of the Internet in political life were too ecstatic. More recent efforts at sober second thought, including Davis' The Web of Politics, Kamarck and Nye's Democracy.com? and Wilhelm's Democracy in a Digital Age are too somber.

Wilhelm's Democracy in a Digital Age has the most thorough and sensible review of contemporary thought on the social construction of technology and the technological construction of society. He groups authors and pundits as neofuturists, dystopians, and technorealists, but also saunters by Derrida, Heidegger, and Habermas. He offers a concise grouping of the ways public communication may be facilitated or inhibited by conducting politics online. First, public communication will be affected by the skills and resources people bring to the process of engagement. Second, it will be affected by the distribution of computing resources across familiar categories of social inequality - race, gender and class. Third, people will have to commit to a deliberative process that involves subjecting one's opinions to public scrutiny and validation. Finally, the technical design of software applications, network architecture and hardware devices will affect the quality and quantity of political engagement online. His conclusion, in line with his peers, is that political communication online is unraveling the democratic character of the public sphere. Barriers to entry into the digitally-mediated public sphere are high, the online public does not represent or reflect the American public, the speed of the networked democracy undermines the useful slow pace of democratic decision making, and the public sphere itself is giving way to market pressures, pay-per-use services and privately owned media environments. However, barriers to entry are actually dropping because of market pressures, the online public is becoming demographically representative, and speeding up the deliberative process may weaken the political power of social elites.

Kamark & Nye's Democracy.com? is an edited collection of some creative philosophical papers and some number-crunching content analysis. Fans of Keohane & Nye's power and interdependence rubric will find familiar arguments in a concluding chapter about the international system of infopolitics. Two of the most interesting pieces in the collection include Pippa Norris' chapter "Who Surfs?" and Kamarck's chapter "Campaigning on the Internet in the Elections of 1998." Norris groups ideas about how the Internet may affect politics into mobilization theories claiming that net use will facilitate and encourage new forms of political activism, and reinforcement theories suggesting that the net will strengthen, but not transform, existing patterns of political participation. Reviewing survey data from the Pew Research Center she finds an overall pattern of reinforcement in that net-based political activists are already the most motivated, informed and engaged members of the broad electorate. She does not find evidence of an independent net effect that draws the disinterested into politics, though the amount of explained variation in her models is very low and the Pew Surveys are simple and not informed by the developed literature on voter sophistication. Kamark regards the 1998 electoral cycle as the first in which the Internet played a major campaign role. She found that most campaigns just treated their websites as electronic brochures, and rarely found candidates who linked to other sites, gave voter registration information, or updated content more than once a month.

Davis' message is that the Internet is a powerful research and publicity tool benefiting, for the most part, traditional activists. Although some observers thought the Internet would permit a resurgence in small, single-issue advocacy without many financial and intellectual resources, Davis finds that branding is as important in political marketing as it is in product marketing. Traditional political elites seem quite capable of adapting and dominating the Internet age. Davis also devotes several pages to making interesting historical parallels with the role of other communication technologies in political campaigns.

All three books share several good qualities. First, all three books take a multi-method, multidisciplinary approach, and their evidence is richer and arguments more convincing for it. Early work on the Internet was heavily dependent on chat-room and website content analysis. Only in combination with surveys, interviews and experiments do these methods really help paint a picture about how political institutions and cultures are produced and consumed online. This is especially true given the dynamic categories of 'the Internet' and 'the Internet user'. Second, all three books make a rigorous effort to explore fundamental inequalities of access that prevent certain groups of people from reaping any benefit from the world wide web. This commitment to highlighting inequality makes for a consistent message about why policy leadership on access and education is needed for many people to benefit from technological innovation.

All three books share several faults. First, most of the authors rely on 'snapshot' data to backup statements like 'the Internet is not like America" (Davis) while at the same time acknowledging that studying the social construction of the Internet is studying a dynamic process. Instead of relying on survey data from 1998, which is often the Pew media studies, the authors could have made greater effort to map change over time. If they had done so, they would have found that the Internet is indeed becoming more like America, something not revealed by data from a single point in time. The gender gap has already disappeared, though diversity in class, race and ethnicity are only slowly coming to the online population.

Second, most of the authors who study the role of communication technology in politics focus exclusively on the public Internet. Each of these texts does a good job of narrowing their area of interest with literature reviews of 'deliberative democracy' debates and justifying their focus on the public Internet. Only Wilhelm addresses the social role of other technologies, intranets, and private databases, even though these are related to how the public Internet is used by both consumers and producers. They have important roles in the organization of political parties and candidate teams, and anyone interested in the role of technology in deliberation should be concerned with how these technologies affect both personal privacy and institutional transparency. At the very least, the authors should have justified their exclusive interest in the Internet.

Third, implicit in the analytical frames of all three texts is the idea that media access will have an additive effect. In other words, nonvoters with televisions, radios, and VCRs who simply add an Internet connection to their household are not likely to be more politically active because the Internet, despite its peculiarities, is really just another one media. However, people do not exclusively read newspapers, watch TV or sit down to use the Internet. People do supplement their media consumption with primary and secondary sources, and it may be that adding the Internet to a household compliments a family's informal research requirements in a way that simply adding the TV to the household of the 1950s did not. The interaction of media types may actually make a more informed and enthusiastic voter. This may be true because people are more likely to avail themselves of a research tool with a self-directed inquiry and because people may be more trusting of information from a website. Explicitly testing for these kinds of interaction effects should have been a research priority.

Finally, these studies reflect the unfortunate trend in political science to jump right into new fields of inquiry with quantitative analysis. Although all the studies used several methods, rarely were these qualitative methods. As a result, their subject has been the average voter and the average politician. Politics is conducted by many kinds of people and organizations, and detailed ethnographic study and cross case comparison of modern activists, lobbyists, or particular campaigns might find improvements in the quality of political discourse. Its one thing to try to count more voters, another to assess better voters. A better voter is more informed, more motivated to actually participate, and has a contagious effect in activating their peers through engaging political debate. What if these communication technologies improve democracy by introducing new ways for citizens to relate their preferences to political leaders? Theories in social science tend to come from rich, detailed investigation, and only later get tested on simplified, aggregated data. This subject of inquiry is still at the stage where we can learn most from detailed ethnography and participant observation.

Clearly this literature is maturing, as the books coming out today are not edited collections but single-authored, comprehensively researched books with well developed arguments. These three texts compliment each other: Wilhelm for great conceptual tools, Kamarck & Nye for statistical analysis, and Davis for historical perspective.  But when these authors tackled the question of whether communication technology improves the quality and quantity of political discourse, should their answer have been simply 'no'? Shouldn't their answer have been 'not yet'?

last modified on
01/11/2002