Let me confess up front that I intend to raise some questions, but offer no recommendations.  While the nature of the questions raised raises some troubling issues, I will not offer any solutions.  The value I intend to offer is to make an attempt at clarifying the questions and issues, and in that there is value.

Making good decisions requires that the person making the decision have two things, the relevant information and the wisdom to know what to do based on the relevant information.  This applies equally to decisions made for yourself as an individual and decisions made for you as part of a group.  The reason some governmental systems work better than others is that they are better at getting people who have the two requirements for making a good decision into decision making positions.

The ability of a system of government to get the right people into decision making positions is not necessarily inherent to the system.  Some systems, such as direct democracy or true communism, work well only with small groups with small issues.  This is because everyone has input into every decision, so the groups and issues have to small enough for everyone to have the relevant information.  Once a certain size or complexity of issue is reached it is no longer possible to assure that the relevant information is possessed and understood by everyone in the group.  This is what led to the development of the representative democracy, particularly a noteworthy experiment started in 1776.

The strength of the representative democracy is that only the elected representatives have to possess the relevant information and the wisdom to act on it.  All the voter needs is the information and wisdom to select good representatives.  This enables representative democracy to work on a much larger scale both in the number of governed and the complexity of issues addressed.  Yet there have been changes since 1776 that may affect how well representative democracy works. 

Marshall McLuhan, a media theorist, posited that, “The medium is the message.”  The essence of his premise is that the medium carrying information in some ways shapes the information.  A simple and logical observation, but one with many consequences.  Some of these consequences affect representative democracy.  Examples of this is how the electorate gains information about the candidate and the candidate about the electorate.  In 1776 this information flowed mainly though the conduits of people and print.  Now a large percentage of the information voters have about candidates comes through “sound b ites” and web communities.  Elected officials now receive information about the voters through polls and “netroots” campaigns.  There has been an exponential increase in the amount of information available, but the character of the information has changed.  A significant trend is that the information is in many ways less personal.  Voters get a professionally managed image rather than candidate.  Candidates and elected officials get elected or reelected by appealing to statistical aggregations of voters rather than actual people they know.  This has changed the character of the governmental process.
 

“Character” is a felicitous term here.  It also points out that the voter did not choose just a set of ideas or principles, but a person of a certain character who would act on the voter’s behalf.  This is the strength of representative democracy.  The voter learns enough about the candidates to choose wisely and the elected candidates learn and act wisely on the voter’s behalf after that.

This leads to the key question: Have the changes in the character of the information exchanged between the voter and the candidate changed in a way that reduces or eliminates the voter’s ability to assess the character of the candidates?  Is there no alternative to the voter being left with a choice between professionally created images rather than between candidates of known character?

The recent resurgence of partisanship and the “divide” that has worried so many of late may be a reaction to the depersonalization of the electoral process.  Partisanship is, in some ways, a method of personalizing politics and politicians.  When the information available to me does not allow me to draw a conclusion about the character of the individual candidate, I may re-personalize the process by making a decision about the character of a party and imputing that character to the candidates of that party.

If the effectiveness of representative democracy depends on voters being able to know which candidate truly represents them best, what effects have the technologies of the Information Age had on this process?  Is increased partisanship a healthy response to technological changes that affect the electoral process, or is it an unhealthy compensation that will weaken representative democracy?  These are questions to which I would welcome your answers.