Contents - Index

Online Participation Paper

Public Interest Network Project
October 7, 2003
Larry Boyd, William Boyd, & Wes Boyd
Revised Draft Paper

Is Online Citizen Participation a Cure for an Ailing American Democracy?  

The essence of a healthy democracy is contained in the diversity and competition of institutions and ideas that operate to ensure that no single institution or idea can tyrannize the others.  This is the doctrine of the balance of powers in a complex society with multiple institutions and a multitude of competing ideas.  By this measure, American democracy is ailing.  Symptoms of that ailment include bitterly contested elections, erosion of civil liberties, corruption in high places, repressive government secrecy, global condemnation, widening of the gap between rich and poor, failing domestic and foreign programs, widespread distrust of government and politicians, and public dissatisfaction and disengagement.  

The source of problem is the domination of institutions and ideas by large corporations and concentrated wealth.  The solution lies in re-balancing the system.  Therein lies the problem.  Change must come from an independent source of power.  People are the only independent source in the system.  That is to say, the only solution to the ills of democracy is more democracy.  Unfortunately, that argument is circular.  Proposals from extending participation abound but ultimately all are wishful thinking because they must be sanctioned by the same system they seek to change.  In short the great quest for participatory democracy and the solution to American democracy's problem appear to have hit a brick wall.  

But have they?  This paper explores the possibility that the recent waves of grass roots political activism via the Internet foretell a solution right under our noses.  Will this phenomenon evolve into the institutional means by which the American people find expression in a representative democracy? Will this phenomenon become an independent force in American politics powerful enough to check over-reaching governments and corporations and restore balance? Is this the solution that has eluded philosophers for centuries because they simply could not have foreseen today's army of educated, informed, and technically savvy citizens armed with unlimited connectivity on the Internet?



The Cyberspace Grass Roots Uprisings

From time to time during periods of political crises, Americans step around representative government and burst into intensive grass roots political action. The turn of the 21st century is one of those times.  In 1998, in response to the attempt to remove President Clinton from office, Moveon.org took the national spotlight and it was followed by a flood of similar Internet-based public interest advocacy networks, such as Win Without War, True Majority, and People for the American Way.  This was the beginning of a popular uprising that is both quantitatively and qualitatively different from predecessors.  In sheer volume of individual political acts and the number of issues involved, it ranks high among popular movements. Qualitatively, it is different in composition, processes, and leadership style and it is playing out on an entirely new medium.  Instead of dissenters hitting the streets, millions of information age civilians hit the information highways with far-reaching agendas for change and a political statement that proclaimed that their desires and expertise could no longer be ignored.  

Unlike previous movements, political actions in this new medium are at once more immediate, more informed, shorter in duration, more focused, and more highly targeted through innovative Internet technologies and collegial leadership.  Actions also are different because activists move in and out as they pursue their own lives and careers.  In some respects the front lines are manned by a rotating citizens vanguard.  The result is that the movement is very broad-based and democratic in its composition and in important ways is the antithesis of elitist theories of social movements.

Emerging from this phenomenon is a huge, rapidly growing, and fluid network of largely self-organizing Internet-based public interest groups, now numbering in the thousands, along with email lists, bulletin boards, personal weblogs, and family and friends discussion groups, together numbering in the millions.  In this network, issue identification and decision-making is informal and collegial and the role of leaders is to facilitate peers.  Political power lies not in voting or social myth but in huge (virtual) crowds, independence, connectivity, communication skills, experience, knowledge, skills, lightning-fast responses, and (collectively) very deep pockets.  

Unlike previous movements that depended mostly on public rallies and demonstrations, this network targets every influence point in the system, including the executive, congress, the courts, the media, corporations, and the public itself.  Its tools include bulletins, issue forums, petitions, vigils, demonstrations and rallies, boycotts, litigation, lobbying, media ads, candidate support, letter writing campaigns, independent polling, and sign, banner, and flyer campaigns.




Why Should Online Participation Work?

Why should this solution work when other grand schemes cannot?  The short answer lies in its "emergent" or "bottom-up" dynamics.  Ironically, it should work while other participatory schemes do not or cannot precisely because it is not a scheme.  No one designed or even foresaw this remedy.  It was simply pent-up anger toward the government and the demand to participate that was allowed to happen by the Internet.  Therefore, this citizen participation did not need the establishment's sanction or even its blessing.  Its legal foundation is the sovereignty of the people in the American Constitution, the 1st Amendment and the right to assemble and to petition.  

It also works because of the emergence of a new kind of peer leadership who foresaw that the role of leadership in this kind of phenomenon was to facilitate.  It works because acts of political participation were made so comprehensible, simple, convenient, and fast by the Internet and emergent technologies that even the busiest professional could take action - frequently and effectively.  

There is another reason why this bottom-up remedy should work.  Except for extraordinary circumstances, high levels of participation are dismally low at the national level, but participation at the local level is and always has been much higher.  In this context, the great Internet grass roots uprising did not emerge from nothing.  The Internet new public interest technologies pulled down the barrier between participation in local and national (and global) politics. In other words, the disposition to participate was there all the time - albeit silenced by inherent restrictions of the national political system.  "Grass roots" captures the spontaneous nature of the national political movement on the Internet, but it quite literally describes the local origins of the disposition to action.  In an important sense, applications of Internet technology to the public interest are making great (virtual) town halls of national politics.

Is Bottom-Up Cyberspace Participation Here to Stay?

 Will the technologies endure? The answer is obvious as well as momentous.  Like any other major technological development or invention, once out of the box there is no putting it back.  Will cyberspace participation continue at the same or higher level of intensity?  There is no reason why it should not, given the dynamics described above. Will this phenomenon evolve into a permanent new political institution?  This is a more complex question.  What do we mean by "institution?"  If we simply mean an independent force, then from the irreversibility premise, it is already a political institution.  However, if the bar is raised to include a codified technology, self-awareness as something bigger than a single advocacy net, and high levels of connectivity among advocacy networks (perhaps with umbrella organizations), and if we mean high levels of awareness of and responsiveness to advocacy networks by other parts of the system, then we have some serious empirical research to do.  

If, as implied above, we are asking whether the underlying dispositions to take actions are here to stay, we can look to local levels to see that high levels of participation have been relatively constant.  In an important sense, the Internet and facilitating technologies of public interest networks have simply solved the scaling problem and brought the levers of power and influence at the national level to the fingertips of citizens.

The Ultimate Question: Does Participation Solve the Problem?

Does this new democratic technology "work" in the sense of being "effective" at restoring balance to the system?  This is an empirical question and can only be answered by research and history.  It is not an easy question.  The level of analysis is the "system." The ultimate question is, "Does the public interest network check over-reaching power centers, in particular the domination of corporations, and does it restore the system to health?  This is like asking, "Do labor unions work?"  Does the media as watchdog work?  Do commercial interest groups work?  For that matter, it is like asking does the Senate work.  We can do conventional outcome analysis and determine whether certain campaigns were "successful."  However, aside from the problem of defining "success" in such analyses, it will be difficult to determine whether "unsuccessful" campaigns (perhaps as an aggregate phenomenon) act as future deterrents ("checks") to power-grabbers because of the costs and bad publicity.  Also, the extent to which the campaign (or battery of campaigns) affected public opinion and indirectly affected the future actions of policy makers is difficult to know.

Watchdog or More? The Development of Public Interest Network "Programs"

Investigating whether the public interest network achieves it purpose, which is to restore the health of American democracy, raises another set of important questions.  Among these is the question whether this new political force will act primarily and perhaps exclusively as the people's "watchdog" in the system or whether it will initiate programs and reforms.  For example, deliberative polls and deliberative citizens groups were highly developed concepts in the 90's, but they were really only dreams because they visualized the mechanisms for participation but not the means for implementing them.  The Public Interest Network provides the means for making them a reality.  Consequently, major programs like citizen's deliberation task forces and citizen's deliberative referenda might be initiated in the future.  

Is Structural (Constitutional) Reform Necessary?

Watchdog functions and special programs may not be enough to restore health to the American political system because the imbalances are profound and basically structural.  These structural imbalances favor those in power in government and corporations and handicap or threaten the viability of the public interest network.  Consequently, the public interest network may have to be used to seek political reform as in changes to electoral rules and amendments to the Constitution.  For example, one can imagine support for those groups and individuals who have been calling for proportional representation.  Proponents of proportional representation argue that PR is the only way to get people voting and involved in politics and point to New Zealand as an example.

A Second Layer of Reform - Changes in the Economic Infrastructure?

It is not difficult to imagination that the public interest network may go beyond political (structural) reform to economic (infrastructure) reform.  Concentrations of wealth are typically the result of past power configurations and processes and the concentration of wealth means the concentration of political power.  An example of increasing public recognition is energy policy that is dependent on fossil fuels.  The production of fossil fuels is organizational-intensive and therefore highly vulnerable to monopoly.  This infrastructure and corporate monopoly directly or indirectly drives all American domestic and foreign policy.  Instead of attacking bad energy policies piece-meal, one can imagine the public interest network launching a great campaign to support decentralized and renewable energy sources with the long-term goal of breaking the current hold of the oil and government partnership.  The theoretical foundations of this front might be works like Natural Capitalism.  Other examples might be more focused on transportation or medical care.  It could easily be argued that in terms of priority this should come even before political reform.  

Can a Spontaneous Phenomenon be Nurtured?

The more that the emergent Internet-based groundswell of public participation appears to contain the seeds of a permanent phenomenon, the more democratic theorists and political consultants will want to know exactly what it is that advocacy nets do.  What are the general guiding principles of the technology?  What are the major objectives, targets, strategies, and tactics?  What is the relationship between leaders and participants?  To what extent is advocacy specialized?  What is the relationship among advocacy networks?  Explaining this new phenomenon is basic science for many scholars and students of democracy, but many are more interested in "codifying" the phenomenon so that every new advocacy network does not have to learn the principles and solve the problems all over again.

Some critics may question whether a phenomenon that has a strong "emergent" (spontaneous) dimension can be nourished, enhanced, and stimulated from outside?  Can outsiders accelerate it?  Help solve its problems?  Can supporters of public interest nets help to institutionalize the emergent phenomenon?  Can supporters help to prevent natural pitfalls in the technology, problems originating within the system, and problems imposed by adversaries?  

The answer these questions is an affirmative.  By analogy, healthy immune systems respond naturally and immediately to threats to the organism.  But, immune systems can be weakened or strengthened by outside intervention, like changes in life style, environment, physical fitness, therapy, and medications.  We believe the same can be said about participatory democracies.  The more difficult question is how to do it and how to do it without unanticipated negative consequences.

The Dark Shadows of Political Philosophy on Contemporary Thinking about Citizen Participation

Philosophical discussions about "democracies" reach back to the ancient Greek City States.  These little democracies involved assemblies of small numbers of eligible participants now referred to as "direct democracies."  More recent examples are the New England town hall assemblies.  The legacy of those discussions for thinking about large-scale systems has not been altogether positive - and we can be sure that the same shadow will be cast over this new phenomenon of online citizen participation.  Instead of emphasizing the potentially positive effects of participation on the polity and the individual, those little democracies are generally held high as "proof" that wide citizen participation in decision-making in large-scale systems is simply impossible.  This argument against citizen participation in large-scale systems became known as the "scaling problem."  That problem says in effect that there are no real-life places big enough to enable large numbers of citizens to stand up and express their preferences and arrive at a consensus through deliberation.  Our argument in this paper is that armies of educated citizens, armed with high levels of connectivity on the Internet in effect have solved the scaling problem and in a figurative sense made a village of the nation.

Another legacy of political philosophy centers on the "nature of man" and casts another shadow over contemporary thinking about citizen participation in government.  The unmistakable message from St. Augustine to St. Thomas Aquinas to Reinhold Niebuhr to Thomas Hobbs to Edmund Burke is that man is so depraved or mentally deficient or just plain ignorant that government by elites is necessary to protect the masses from themselves. Democracy in large-scale systems became the object of serious discussion only a hundred years or so ago with the invention of representative government, but it carried with it the heavy baggage of pessimism about human nature and the need for government by the few.  Democracy is not possible because the general public lacks the necessary characteristics to govern itself.  This belief endures under various guises even today.  It is often hauled out to support the claims of elites to power and to support arguments against greater citizen inclusion.  But, it is not true in the United States today that people are not educated enough or informed enough or do not have sufficient stake in the system to participate in their governance.  In fact, in this information age, the tables have turned because the government needs advice from the public on complex and highly technical issues.  We argue in this paper that public interest networks will play that role.

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Proposed Research

The authors are currently involved in a research and development project aimed at answering some of the questions raised by this paper.

(Here, we can briefly summarize our research intensions and plan, including the major hypotheses and we can mention modeling and simulations to learn how the phenomenon works and put prediction boundaries around outcomes given a range of parameters.)

Brief Punchy Conclusion forecasting a new line of democratic discourse