Brendyn O’Dell-Alexander – Critical Paper Week 6

When Congress enacts legislation, it does so after considering a multitude of

inputs. One consideration is “what actions attentive and inattentive citizens will

allow.” (Arnold p. 122) And what citizens allow depends greatly on what they know.

To give consent, a citizen must first know about the potential implications and

effects of a policy. But legislators are keen to keep anticipated effects, especially

costs, out of the public’s sight. The Bush administration’s 2001 tax cut exemplifies

this desire and demonstrates the manipulative ways in which politicians can mask

the true impact of a piece of legislation to forestall citizen activity. Indeed,

regarding the 2001 tax bill, “the suppression of accurate government analyses and

the relentlessly misleading presentation probably did lessen the immediacy of

voters’ concern.” (Hacker and Pierson p. 44)

What options do citizens have in a situation where “voters have many ways

to compensate for their…informational limitations, but elites have at least as many

strategies to prey on those limitations?” (Hacker and Pierson, p. 37) In the past,

options may have been scarce. But today, with pervasive modern technology,

information systems, namely the Internet, provide new channels for citizens to

harness their collective knowledge and power to more fully realize the effects of

proposed policies and to take action on them.

Arnold states that awareness of an effect depends upon “its magnitude, its

timing, the proximity of other people who are similarly affected, and the availability

of an instigator,” and concludes that “all four factors are known or knowable…when

a policy is first adopted.” (Arnold p. 35) The Internet as an information tool can

primarily decrease proximity barriers and enhance awareness of the magnitude and

timing of policy provisions. To a lesser extent, I believe it can also increase the
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probability that an instigator will come upon an issue and, via technological

channels, incite the relevant citizenry.

The Internet has unquestionably demolished geographical barriers.

Constituents in a West coast district affected by a particular policy issue can,

unimpeded, organize with those in an East coast district through e-mail, social

networks, instant messenger, or cell phones. This ability to instantly connect to one

another and share information is a valuable political asset. As Hacker and Pierson

put it, “processes of social aggregation have strong rationalizing qualities that

enhance the electorate’s power.” (p. 35) Virtual communities like reddit.com and

digg.com enable exactly this type of social aggregation. Users submit topics and the

community discusses them, voting communally for particularly salient contributions

and suppressing inaccurate or inappropriate ones. Participation in this community

then provides users with information that has undergone the aforementioned

collective rationalization process. In this way, previous barriers to collaboration and

mass organization, such as geographical proximity and population size, are

removed.

Of additional value, the Internet is inherently democratic and control over it

decentralized—no single, central power regulates the flow of information to and

from those who connect to it. This level of openness addresses “a fundamental

weakness of optimistic claims about…aggregation—namely, the assumption that

"good" information will be relatively equally distributed among voters.” (Hacker and

Pierson p. 36) From Converse as quoted by Hacker and Pierson, “with information

as with wealth, 'them that has gets'.” (p. 37) The Internet can enable citizens to

obtain knowledge about the effects of proposed policies more freely and to
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subsequently use that knowledge to get what is best for them from their

government.

In a similar vein, for many people, increased access to information provided

by the Internet can help them and others become aware of magnitude and timing

issues within legislation. I will build upon the previous social community example to

elaborate this point. First, though, it is necessary to outline two anecdotal

assumptions about why the typical citizen now avoids reading congressional

documents: 1) the documents are too long; and 2) perhaps more importantly, there

are too many of them for one person to feasibly read. For example, the 110th

Congress authored 7,441 bills and joint resolutions averaging 16.7 pages each1.

That amounts to nearly 125,000 pages, a daunting number even to those

accustomed to reading a lot. It is thusly understandable how political elites would

expect magnitude and timing issues to remain safely hidden in such a massive

amount of legislation.

With that in mind, suppose these proposed policies are posted to a social

community on the Internet whose users are self-tasked with reading the documents

and commenting on what they find. While 125,000 pages may deter one person,

one thousand people, a number on the lower end of typical virtual community sizes

to be sure, now have only 125 pages each to read. As the size of the community

grows, which is likelier as it has no geographical or population boundaries, the

amount the community is capable of processing increases, too. To take this further,

imagine that even a small fraction of the U.S. population, say 1/25th, became

involved in this effort as a form of compulsory citizen participation. The collective

1
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2009/09/22/AR2009092203473.html
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group could process many times the amount of legislation currently produced by

Congress. There are, of course, realistic issues with this. Who, after all, wants to

spend their free time reading legislation, or has the expertise to both parse what

they read and recognize issues when they occur? The point, however, is that this

type of aggregate participation is technologically feasible and could increase the

likelihood of discovering secretive policies as well as the constituency’s ability to

hold their representatives accountable.

Finally, to touch on the last of the four factors of effect visibility, the

probability of a present instigator increases substantially when the Internet is

involved. One need only look to recent instantaneous uproars caused by Twitter

tweets to see the instigative potential of accessible mass communication. With one

click, an individual can send a message to an incredible number of people,

mobilizing them rapidly. Then-Senator Obama used these tools to his advantage

during the presidential election, amassing e-mail lists hundreds of thousands of

addresses long. If the government can use these tools to galvanize constituents,

constituents can and should do the same.

As a last theoretical conception, imagine the power of combining the above

benefits into a single scenario: a person submits a piece of legislation to a social

community site, the members comb through the pages and uncover embedded

sunset clauses and phase-in provisions, then quickly broadcast the findings out to

the whole community via e-mail or Twitter. The resulting political pressure this

could impose on legislators, causing them to rethink similar provisions in future

legislation, would be substantial. This vision, of course, bumps up against the issue

of inattentive publics, which Arnold describes as “those who have neither firm policy

preferences about an issue nor knowledge of what Congress is considering.” (p. 65)
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Perhaps, though, these citizens are inattentive because they are daunted by the

issues highlighted in this paper, and would be attentive given the right tools and

motivation. By employing the Internet to help overcome proximity barriers and

uncover legislative legerdemain, citizens could hold their government to a higher

level of accountability and ensure that their demands have top priority in legislative

decision making.

References

Arnold, R. D. (1990). Logic of Congressional Action. New Haven: Yale University

Press.

Hacker, J. S., & Pierson, P. (2005). Abandoning the Middle. Perspectives on Politics,
3 , 33-53.