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Gronke WL040/Bidgoli-Vol III-Ch-07 July 11, 2003 11:45 Char Count= 0
PoliticsPolitics
Paul Gronke,Reed CollegeIntroduction 84
“Machine” Politics in an Electronic Age:
Who Is Being Served? 84
Rational Choice and Democratic Participation 85
The Mass Public 87
Lowering the Costs of Participation via Low-Cost
Computing 87
New Tools for Political Learning and Interaction 87
A Case Study in the Internet as a Tool of Mass
Participation: E-voting 88
The Mass Public in a Wired World:
Old Wine in New Bottles? 89Political Institutions: The Internet
as a Tool of Mobilization 90
Campaign Use of the Internet 90
Interest Groups and Political Parties on the Web 91
The Hotline to Government? The Internet
and Direct Democracy 92
Conclusion 93
Glossary 94
Cross References 94
References 94INTRODUCTION
Holding torches to light the night sky in October 1876,
nearly 4,000 people rallied around a temporary platform
in New Haven, Connecticut’s sixth electoral ward. One
hundred twenty-two years later, nearly 2 million “hits”
were recorded on the “Jeb Bush for Governor” Web page,
4,000 Wisconsin citizens signed up for e-mail “listserv”
distribution of information about Russell Feingold’s
(D-WI) Senatorial campaign, and more than 14,000 users
posted messages on an electronic bulletin board main-
tained by the campaign of Jesse “The Body” Ventura
(ex-wrestler, talk show host, and current governor of
Minnesota). The 1998 election was heralded as the first
to demonstrate the potential of the “e-campaign.”
By the 2000 campaign, presidential candidate John
McCain raised $500,000 in a single day over the World
Wide Web. National voter information portals reported
hundreds of thousands of hits daily as the election ap-
proached, and on election day, governmental sites with
real-time election results experienced daily hit rates of
75,000 (Dallas) to 1,000,000 (Washington Secretary of
State) on election day (Sarkar, 2000). And when the
2000 presidential contest was thrown into doubt, nearly
120,000 usersper hourbottlenecked the Florida Secretary
of State’s Web site. Clearly, e-politics is here to stay.
However, just like the old rules of the stock market,
many of the old rules of politics have proved to be sur-
prisingly resilient. Even before the January 2001 presi-
dential inauguration, many of the major politics “portals”
had shuttered their electronic doorways or were undergo-
ing strategic makeovers. Media companies that had spent
millions of dollars developing an online presence were
finding that Internet news sites not just failed to make
money but were major sources of revenue loss (Podesta,
2002). Internet connectivity rates had flattened. Clearly,
e-politics is off in the distant future.
The reality lies somewhere between these two ex-
tremes. The rapid penetration of electronic mail and
World Wide Web access into homes and offices, the pro-
liferation of Web sites, and the emergence of the Internetas a new forum for communication present vast new
opportunities for citizen participation in the political
process. Traditional—and increasingly nontraditional—
political organizations (candidate campaigns, political
parties, and interest and activist groups) cannot ignore
the power of the Internet tomobilizecitizens.
This chapter will review the impact of the Internet on
political participation, using the rational choice model of
participation as a lens. According to the rational choice
theory of participation, unless individual citizens, after
assessing the costs and benefits of political action, find
it in their self-interest to participate, they will decline
to do so. Although the Internet may lower one cost of
participation—easy access to information—the glut of in-
formation on the Internet may increase the costs of selec-
tion and comprehension. The result may be that citizens
will be overwhelmed, continuing to feel that politics is
distant, complicated, and marginal. Thus, many citizens
continue to have little motivation to get informed and
participate. There is little indication that e-politics will
change this in the foreseeable future. This same “rational
choice” perspective, however, points to those actors and
organizations that do benefit directly from politics: polit-
ical candidates and parties, interest and lobbying groups,
and activist organizations. The Internet has had, and will
continue to have, its greatest impact as a tool for mobi-
lization efforts by political organizations. In the following
sections, I provide a more detailed summary of the ratio-
nal choice model of political participation, followed by
an analysis of how the Internet may change the logic of
participation for individuals, and close by extending the
review to cover political organizations, parties, and the
mass media.“MACHINE” POLITICS IN AN
ELECTRONIC AGE: WHO IS
BEING SERVED?
The old political machine, symbolized by Tammany Hall
and Boss Tweed of New York or Richard Daley of Chicago,84