Information and American Democracy: Technology in the Evolution of Political Power.

By Bruce Bimber. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 268p. $65.00 cloth, $22.00 paper.

Bruce Bimber has written an important and useful book about the new information technologies—primarily the Internet—and American democracy. Bimber's theoretical focus is information, which he defines broadly. His overarching argument is that the cost of information, and the ways in which it is organized, managed, and distributed, have important and at times decisive consequences for political life and political institutions. He uses this perspective to attempt to “illuminate contemporary political developments as well as some critical moments of historical change in the United States” (p. 13).

Bimber begins with the historical narrative and describes four “information regimes” in American political history. These regimes are punctuated by “information revolutions, which involve changes in the structure or accessibility of information” (p. 18). The first regime was associated with the Jacksonian period and was a product of the information revolution produced by the U.S. Postal Service and the newspaper industry. The second, associated with the industrial revolution and the growth of the state, was mostly about information complexity, and helped establish pluralist politics. The third was driven by broadcasting, which reopened a new kind of mass politics. There are numerous facets, wrinkles, and countervailing trends in these revolutions and regimes, which the author describes well.

This is an interesting treatment, which includes a rereading of classic works of American political theory and other political theory in terms of information, including, for example, the Founders, Tocqueville, and Weber. Indeed, most scholars picking up the book will be drawn to it out of the assumption that it is about the Internet and American politics, and that is true, but incomplete. The book is also an imaginative alternative account of the political development of the United States, told through the lens of political information. Appropriately, Bimber intends his version to be an important supplementary account and not a replacement for other theories of political development.

The newest, fourth regime is, of course, the one occasioned by the Internet. Bimber's thesis “is that technological change in the contemporary period should contribute toward information abundance, which in turn contributes toward postbureaucratic forms of politics. This process involves chiefly private political institutions and organizations such as civic associations, as well as interest groups, rather than formal governmental institutions rooted in law or the Constitution” (p. 21). The result of the information abundance and new information ecology is “a diminished role on many fronts for traditional organizations in politics,” as well as “accelerated pluralism,” and a politics increasingly “organized around not interests or issues, but rather events and the intensive flow of information surrounding them” (p. 22).

Bimber uses both quantitative and qualitative evidence in sketching all this out empirically, and in particular relies on a set of his own case studies and surveys from recent years. This evidence is useful and makes for interesting reading, but also reveals the book's principal shortcoming, which I will describe below.

The book concludes with a brief comparison of current developments in other nations, a rumination on political inequality in terms of political information that draws principally on the conclusion of Robert Dahl's Democracy and Its Critics (1989), and a critical consideration of the new technology's effects on the public sphere, which draws principally on Habermas.

Information and American Democracy should appeal to scholars working in politics and information technology, American political development, social movements, democratic theory, and political participation, in roughly that order. In that vein, it should also be noted that it deftly treats a wide range of literatures in the field and that it is well written. I do not, however, see it having much of a readership outside academic circles, given its format, style, and content.

The book has its flaws, of course. Bimber's conclusions have a tendency toward the “on the one hand, on the other” format—his final conclusion on the value of the new technology for American democracy is decidedly agnostic. And while his case studies provide compelling stories about the political power of the Internet, the connection between the theoretical arguments and the empirical material is not always clear, and it is not clear just how the American political development narrative bears on understanding the current case studies and the contemporary situation more generally. Indeed, in many respects, Bimber has written two books contained here in this volume, divided roughly in half.

My deepest criticism, however, is that the author understudies and underrates the horizontally interactive aspect of the Internet, or to use other terms that have been advanced to describe the aspect, the many-to-many, citizen-to-citizen (c-c), interconnective, social-capital and community-building potential of the Internet, and in particular, of e-mail. It is this limitation, I think, that leads him to puzzle over aggregate-level data on participation that indicate little overall positive effect from the new technology, and that simply do not compute with his qualitative stories in the case studies. He is aware of this limitation in his focus, and notes and argues for it several times. Nonetheless, it prevents him from thoroughly appreciating the Internet's true political potential, and why it can appear to some organizations to be of little real use, while other organizations that have figured out how to tap its community-building, participatory, and grassroots potential—such as, as of this writing, Howard Dean's presidential campaign—have enjoyed great Internet successes. Another way to say this is that particularly in Bimber's quantitative data, but also in his qualitative data, both the independent variable of Internet use and the dependent variable of political activity need to be broadened and enriched, in order to understand what is really happening—and what could happen—in his fourth regime.

But these criticisms are not intended to discount the overall positive contribution of this book, which is significant. I would place it among a small number of books within the past five years or so that have illuminated this subfield, a subfield that will only grow in importance in the discipline.