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Can the Internet Improve Politics?
Introducing the idea of network-based
collective decision making
Hanno Scholtz
1
Abstract:
Can the internet improve politics? As the question scarcely been discussed by the “classic” texts on
internet and politics of the 1990s, it is asked now in light of the experiences since.
Question and answer are structured in five steps: (1) Politics is about counting, ever more, and the
web is good in counting. (2) Politics counts evaluations, and the web is good in evaluations. (3)
Political evaluations bear cognitive costs that need to be alleviated, ever more, through trust, and the
web is good in employing trust. (4) Political trust relations increasinly have a general network
structure, and the web is good in networks. (5) Political trust relations need to be stored, and the
web is good in storing sensible data.
While the first three steps describe a type of e-democracy that would be only “nice to have”, steps 4
and 5 point to necessary improvements: The web allows for a network-based collective decision
making that efficiently fits the necessities of societies that are not longer satisfied with a kind of
representation that urges everyone to align to one group for all issues. Individualization and the
cultural demands of non-Western societies go in the same direction in demanding a different and
necessarily web-based solution for the cognitive-cost problem of democracy.
Word count: 5315
1
University of Zurich, Andreasstrasse 15, CH 8050 Zurich, hanno.scholtz@uzh.ch. Parts of the research for this article was done
when I was working at the Universities of Konstanz, Germany, and of Fribourg, Switzerland.
Can the internet improve politics? On first sight, the question seems “so 1990s”. It might have been
asked when the web was young, and when indeed some grizzled visionaries placed high hopes in the
new medium. But neither does of the old texts on the internet and politics or democracy (e.g.
Barlow, [1996] 2001; Grossman, 1996; Negroponte, 1995; Rheingold, 1993; Sunstein, 2001) really
address the issue, nor did it get prominence in the practical development of the web. Instead, these
were the days when young visionaries preferred to tinker in their garages to become billionaires, and
when many experiences were not yet available that are commonplace by now – including the
unfortunate experience that democracy does not longer work as smooth as it did in the 1950s and
even still in the 1990s, and including the experience that citizens around the world demand a say.
Both with regards to information and communication and with regards to society, we have
experienced a lot over the last two to three decades. This paper links the general functions of politics
with these two lines of experience.
It asks the question anew, and aims to give an answer, in five steps: (1) Politics is about counting,
ever more, and the web is good in counting. (2) Politics counts evaluations, and the web is good in
evaluations. (3) Political evaluations bear cognitive costs that need to be alleviated, ever more,
through trust, and the web is good in employing trust. (4) Political trust relations increasinly have a
general network structure, and the web is good in networks. (5) Political trust relations need to be
stored, and the web is good in storing sensible data.
The central argument is that web-based counting efficiently fits the necessities of societies that are
not longer satisfied with a kind of representation that urges everyone to align to one group for all
issues. Individualization and the cultural demands of non-Western societies go in the same direction
in demanding a different and necessarily web-based solution for the cognitive-cost problem of
democracy.
Politics is counting
Politics is about collective decisions. In its best form, it is about legitimate collective decisions that
are accepted by everyone and hence produce reliability for individual expectations. Of course,
politics is about many other things, too. Power, opinion formation, deliberation, social learning,
implementation and execution and many more things are part of the political process, too. But
decision-making is central.
2
Decision-making implies the evaluation of possible options against each other. Options have to be
developed, to be evaluated, and finally one of them has to be chosen. The process of ranking and
finally selecting one as the winning option that shall be implemented is a process of counting the
pros and cons, i.e counting support for the different options. Counting is not always explicit, but it is
always present. Even dictators employ secret services that inform them about possible opposition
related to specific options when they make decisions.
Democracy however has made transparent and equality-based counting a basic principle.
Transparency and equality are important because they both add to legitimacy. The equality principle
is a convention that sets an end to struggles for higher influence. It is is hence not applied in the form
of individual equality (one man, one vote) to all collective decisions that are made in the world:
2
Power, the central political category for some best-known definitions of politics (Machiavelli, 1968; Weber, 2015), makes sense
only insofar as it leads to influence in decisions that are closer to the interests of the powerful, and other aspects of political
life can be related to the centrality of collective decisions as well (Easton, 1965).
Scholtz Can the Internet Improve Politics? 3
Collective decisions of shareholder, as an important exception, follow an equality principle based on
investment size. But if a political process does not apply some equality principle, there always remain
incentives to struggle for those who are disadvantaged by the prevalent distribution.
With counting, the problem of finding the best among K possible solutions is transformed into the
maximization of support among the I elective individuals – support zik is the higher the higher an
option is ranked:
(1)
There is a huge literature discussing this transformation and pointing to possible and historical
deviations from the implied equality of optima, but among Western advanced democracies and with
regards to popular beliefs far beyond them, the Condorcet jury theorem (Condorcet, 1785) is
accepted as closely relating democratic counting to social success.
The principle of counting allows to connect a web-related experience: By now we know that counting
in the internet works perfectly well. Web-based surveys, download statistics, or banner prices based
on access counts are only some examples of the many things that today use web-based counting –
the foundation of the Google story was counting links, and all its algorithms that make the Google
model so successful are based on counting.
One might say, however, that for this aspect of politics the internet is sufficient but not necessary:
Since its earliest uses in Classical Athens, counting has been done by hand, later with paper and
pencil, and finally with stationary computers. Why should we need the web for this process?
We hence have to proceed one step further. All counting processes however need an input to count.
In most of these processes, it is a by-product of something people do anyway and hence not a
subject of deliberate action, but web-based surveys are a good example for the use of counting
something that people enter deliberately and consciously. In democratic politics, the input that is
counted is always deliberate conscious own action. This is part of its legitimacy, as people need to
know which own choice contributes to a collective choice.
Option support is evaluation
This input citizen-related is the evaluation of possible options against each other. Possible figurations
of future mainpulations of reality have to be evaluated and these evaluations entered into the
political process.
Here we have another web-related experience: By now we know that evaluation over the internet
works perfectly well. Today, hotels, restaurants, university professors and public toilets are evaluated
over the internet, and the opportunity and usage of evalution have radically changed many
industries, think only of the influence of Tripadvisor in the travel industry.
Once again one might say, however, that for this aspect of politics the internet is sufficient but not
necessary: Since its earliest uses after the U.S. and French Revolutions, and in direct-democratic
decisions in Athenian assembly and in medieval Swiss towns (Kobach, 1993), evaluations have been
entered through raising hands or through ballots. Why should we need the web for this process?
Scholtz Can the Internet Improve Politics? 4
We hence have to take another step forward. Most of the evaluations that are processed over the
internet are based on direct experience. Evaluating something that will only occur in the future is
more difficult. Social scientists say it bears cognitive cost. Hence not everyone has, and rationally not
even everyone wants to have, an opinion with regards to every question that has to be decided,
because forming opinions is costly (Downs, 1957). This is why grassroots democracy rarely works. But
democracy as we know it has worked for quite some time. So, how are these cognitive costs
reduced?
Cognitive costs are borne by trusted actors
Citizens are relieved from cognitive cost of evaluations by trusted actors. There are numerous
political actors that derive their legitimacy from the fact that they provide option evaluations and
gain a specific profile for these option evaluations and trust for this profile. The history of such actors
starts with individual politicians. The 19th and early 20th centuries added parties as organizations that
united individual politicans with comparable evaluations and institutionalized broad social
movements as the workers’, catholic, liberal or nationalist movements into the democratic process.
Between the early 19th century and 1949, democratic politics became institutionalized in a
representative form in which the maximization problem of equation 1 was restated in a form in
which citizens, in order to reduce cognitive cost, chose only one single support vij every four years
from a much smaller set of J options, namely parties or their repesentants, while the bulk of the
evaluation wjk was left to parties:
(2)
Another century later, the field of trusted actors has become much more diverse. A new universe of
organizations has emerged, with various aims under which the evaluation of political options is only
one but an important function. They are described by a plethora of overlapping terms, e.g. non-
governmental organizations, citizens' action committees, interest groups, lobby organizations, or
advocacy organizations. They all have in common that they evaluate political options, gain a profile
for their evaluations, and acquire trust with this profile to obtain the necessary resources for
continuing their existence, but that they are not included into the formal counting processes of
democratic decision-making but operate in an open but intransparent space of influencing the
politicians and party organizations that bear the formal responsibility.
With regards to trust, we have another web-related experience: By now we know that the expression
of trust over the internet works very well. On Ebay, unknown seller earn significantly lower prices
than those who have built a good reputation and are hence trusted to deliver what they pledge. And
even to come back to Tripadvisor, if you travel with kids you will probably have a closer look on the
evaluations of other parents, whose expressions of praise and critique are more trustworthy for you
than those of pleasure-seeking youngsters or of tired traveling salesmen.
But even here, one may reply that the internet is sufficient but not necessary: Since the beginnings of
elected representation, people have employed trusted actors in the form of kings or other
politicians, and since the 19th century of parties. Why should we need the web for this process?
Scholtz Can the Internet Improve Politics? 5
There is hence one more step needed. Trust in evaluating policies is much more multidimensional
than trust in evaluating hotel offers. This is why the structure of trust relations plays a role.
Network structures of trust
Representative democracy as we know it rests on the partitioning of citizens into mutually non-
overlapping groups. Every voter marks one option on the ballot and classifies herself hence into one
group that has one implicit evaluation on various issues. This partitioning nature of the voting
process allowed for manageable counting procedures under pre-ICT technological conditions. But it
demands that positions on all issues are correlated with each other, and this demands a very specific,
eurocentric social structure. To understand this, we have to delve a bit into the history of social
structure:
From its very beginning, Western Christianity has shaped the structures of trust networks in a specific
way. When the Roman empire broke down and inherited Europe as a continent too connected for
isolation but still too harsh for central domination, Western Christianity made its career by providing
an institutional setting that promoted level differentiation and the mutual co-existence of different
institutional levels (Scholtz, 2016). Hence, every individual got used to be part of a group, and with
this group part of a larger group, but the smaller group was predominantly located within the smaller
group, and the smaller groups accepted the rules of the larger groups. One of the founding fathers of
sociology, Georg Simmel, has coined the phase of “concentric social circles” for this tradtional
structure of European societies (Simmel, 1890).
This training in differentiating levels allowed for the multitude of territorial states in Europe that
existed side-to-side to each other. It led to the development of the economic firm in the form of a
fixed group with internal institutions that allowed to act to the outside as unitary actor, a conception
that was missing in the non-European world (Harris, 2009; Kuran, 2005). It allowed for the first
examples of differentiation-based proto-democracy in medieval cities in Europe, compared to e.g.
the Islamic world: Although they had similar functions (Caracausi & Jeggle, 2014), Cairo and Lahore
were organized in the bazaar (Bhattacharya, Dharampal-Frick, & Gommans, 2007; Geertz, 1978), an
individualist network of trust relations, while York and Bruge, and Augsburg and Cologne and Zurich,
were organized in guilds (Liddy & Haemers, 2013), i.e. groups that achieved a power equilibrium in
ruling their towns by a town council (Allen, 2011; Wahl, 2016).
And it finally allowed for Western representative democracy. It developed two different forms (and
various mixtures), an elder majoritarian form where the groups were defined geographically and
represented by individual politicians and a historically younger form where the the groups were
defined socially or ideologically and represented by parties, but both were based on the
technological form that the individual expressed the trust relation to exactly one socio-political group
in elections, assuming that their group loyalities could be integrated into an overarching party
affiliation.
But as Simmel has already predicted in 1890, this structures cease to exist. In his words, every
individual has become an individualist intersection of specific social circles (i.e. groups), a process
that has been studied anew since the 1980s (Beck, 1983, 1986). Individual characteristics that serve
as the base of group affiliations are less linked to another, creating more realized constellations.
People move from being realizations of “types” to being individuals with unique profiles. With
regards to attitudes, this process has been shown especially for the decreasing linkage between the
Scholtz Can the Internet Improve Politics? 6
dimensions of religious beliefs and behavioral patterns and class, where working class’ worshippers
and burgeouis atheists are nowadays much more common than in the 1960s. And both dimensions
lost explanatory power for electoral decisions (Dogan, 1995; Schnell & Kohler, 1995). But this is only
an example for a general process applying to all kinds of values and attitudes: The average within-
country-year-sample correlation between arbitrary variables in the World Values Surveys has
declined from 9 to 6 percent since the 1980s. (Scholtz, Muggli, & Glatz, 2010)
<< Include “Figure 1: Issue correlation and Individualization” about here >>
Applying partitioning representation in societies that are not culturally structured in partitioning
groups leads to decreasing legitimacy of political decisions. Suppose there are two issue dimensions,
a to b and a’ to b’. As long as there is a group-based social structure that correlates the two issues as
in the left panel of Figure 1, two parties will serve the groups A and B, and almost everyone will be
happy: Most voters feel represented, and as feeling represented, they will be able to accept the
information “their” parties reveal from the bargaining process and communicate to them.
But if voters individualize, large groups C and D of society will not longer feel represented by either of
the parties. Being unable to express their real preferences in the voting process, they lose contact
with the political process, they will no longer be willing to accept the information either of the
parties reveal and communicate, and become alienated and hostile to a political process and political
elites that do not longer represent them.
Additionally, such a structure may lead parties to neglect topics in order not to frighten voters: If only
the a-b dimension is discussed prior to an election, party A may hope to be elected by C voters
additionally to their base group A. The situation is symmetric but if the issue a’-b’ is discussed by A
while B remains silent on it, A may lose and B may win, so every party has an incentive not to be
open on its positions.
Paradoxically, an individualized electorate can even lead to polarization processes, as issues that are
not taken up by parties to keep off-diagonal voters make elections in fact less relevant, and in order
to keep their activists motivated,
3
parties may move to more extreme positions.
Individualization has hence rendered the old group-based political trust structures on which Western
industrial democracies rested invalid. What remains are general social networks, in which every
individual has a lot of trust relations in very different directions.
By now we know (and we didn’t know in the 1990s) that the reproduction of general social network
structures in the internet works perfectly well. Facebook, Linkedin, and many other social network
services store on large servers who is connected to whom in the world, and despite some negative
implications, they have a worldwide success with doing so and being part of our lifes for present and
future.
Network structures of trust in which an individual has trust relations to more than one trusted actors
result in only one small change in the formalization above, allowing the support weights from
individuals to trusted actors to obtain any values between zero and one instead of only these
extreme values (Scholtz, 2002):
3
This argument is based on social identity theory. (Turner, 1987)
Scholtz Can the Internet Improve Politics? 7
(3)
Storage and network-based collective decision making
Storage is a second answer to the individual cost problem in option evaluation described above. In
group-based traditional Western representative democracy, the vote on the ballot is stored in
determining representing politicians for four years. This allowed for a technologically very simple
solution with paper, ballot boxes, and manual counting. But the cost of this simplicity are radically
shrinked options for the exertion of individual voters’ influence that is no longer appropriate for a
society that uses individualizing information and communication techniques in so many ways.
If trust is used politically in its individual form, it has to be individually and securely stored.
By now we know (and we didn’t know in the 1990s) that secure storage in the internet works very
well. Dropbox and any other cloud services store sensible data on large servers and have a worldwide
success with doing so and being part of our lifes for present and future. After many leakings of
sensible data, and with the countinuous threat of hacking (Chiesa, 2015; Holt, 2012; Rid, 2012; Toure,
2014) we can no longer say “perfectly well”, but well enough not to let remaining privacy concerns
erect a complete taboo over considering internet-based political decision making that employs a
storage of trust relations.
If this taboo is tackled, trust relations can be stored. The one undivided vote of industrial
representative democracy is then divided into many trust relations to trusted political actors who
have an opinion about the options available for an upcoming decision. Ranking options means to
support them to different degrees - only the least ranked option gets zero support, any other gets a
bit to express that it is better, in the ranking of the evaluations found. If actors have relative
preference intensities
4
, a distribution of relative utilities can be assigned, in which the least-liked
option Z- is assigned the value zero, the best-liked option Z+ some arbitrary value x, and the options Zi
in between the values pi that make them equivalent to (1-pi) Z- + pi Z+. Due to the arbitariness of x, it
can be chosen to assign normalized relatives utilities that sum up to one over all available options. As
trusted actors can concentrate on the questions that fit their profile, they do not have to diminish
their legitimation by engaging in other questions. Other actors will tackle those questions.
Multiplying the vector of individual trust relations with actors with the matrix of option support by
the trusted actors results in an implicit or represented vector of option support. For
(4)
Individualized storage as possible over the web allows to bridge the difference between democracy
and republic in which previously always republic was more robust and democracy more valuable. For
every upcoming decision anew, the individual citizen has the choice of either leaving this implicit
option support as it is, or inspect and possibly alter it to turn a representative into a direct-
democratic decision. The final equation allows both opportunities:
4
If for any actor A ≻ B and B ≻ C, the actor should know at which probability p he or she is equivalent between getting B for
sure and getting a mixture of p A and (a-p) C.
Scholtz Can the Internet Improve Politics? 8
(5)
Figure 2 shows some possible citizen-user screenshots of a network-based collective decision making
project. After identification, a voter starts with the left pane which shows him proposed options in an
upcoming decision. We assume that there are already trusted actors active in the project who have
entered their rankings, relative preference intensities, and arguments, and who are trusted by some
citizen-voters who give them a relative importance. The citizen voter gets at first a ranking of the
proposals by added support via trusted actors. They can change the sequence of proposals in her or
his ranking by clicking and shifting a proposal to a new position in the ranking.
They also can click on the line between proposals to see another screen (middle pane) with short
descriptions of main arguments and actors supporting and opposing the given ranking. This screen
allows to go into further details with regards to available arguments, and it is one entry point to
enter individual trust in actors. After being informed, the voter returns to the decision screen which
is now changed (a) with regards to the individually entered sequence, (b) the relative preference
intensities with regards to that sequence, and (c) the added support of the individually trusted
actors. If an individual will visit the site for another decision, the column with the “Your TAs”
distribution will already exist, and it will determine the initial sequence.
<< Include “Figure 2: Possible screenshots of a network-based collective decision making project”
about here >>
This kind of network-based collective decision making institutionalizes NGOs, lobbies and social
movement organizations in a way very comparable to that in which the workers movement and the
catholic movement have been integrated in the first half of the 20th century. They, too, had to learn
to accept democratic rules, to canvass for electoral support in the form of trust input, and most of all
to take responsibility.
Network-based collective decision making will most probably not replace all current sorts of political
processes, but for complex, contested, confusing, supra-national or in the other extreme very small
affairs that demand more inclusion of individuals, it is a viable way to use the internet to obtain more
legitimacy in the political process.
<< Include “Table 1: Results overview” about here >>
Conclusion
Can the internet improve politics? Even more: should it? This study answers both question with a
clear Yes.
Table 1 gives an overview over the results. We have studied the question in five systematic steps, in
each case with a theoretical question, a systematic answer to that question, a description of the
social developments in that regard over the last two to three decades, and look on the practically
observed capability of the internet to serve the social demands.
The systematic steps structure the paper: In the first step, politics was defined in its core as decision-
making and hence as counting of support for decision options that were, in a second step, discussed
as evaluations. Evaluations go along with cognitive costs which were, in a third step, found to be
reduced through trusted actors. As the structure of trust matters, it was studied in the fourth step
Scholtz Can the Internet Improve Politics? 9
and found to have changed from a partitioning group-based structure that allowed for Western
representative democracy to a general network structure. In the fifth and last step, the question of
trust strorage of trust led to a system of network-based collective decision making based on
individualized trust storage.
The social developments with regards to these five steps were found to imply a uniform increase of
information processing demands, though some steps showed independent dynamics and others
‘only’ dynamics derived from others. The necessities for the evaluation of political options increase
only with the autonomously increasing number of political decisions, and necessities for storing
individual trust relations have even emerged only with individualization and the end of a partitioning
group-based social structure. The demands for transparent counting processes, the availability of
trusted actors that offer the reduction of cognitive complexity, and the change from partitioning
groups to a general network structure are autonomous social changes that demand higher and finally
connected information processing capabilities as the web provides.
The experience with the web over the three decades we know it showed its ability to cope with all
five social demands of politics. For all five areas, solutions have been developed and successful
enterprises erected that show that these demands can be solved over the web.
In the first three steps, however, only the general question posed above was answered to the
positive. Yes, we can count over the internet, but aren’t stationary computers fine, as well? And yes,
we can enter and use trust evaluations over the web, but isn’t the ballot fine, too? And yes, there is a
huge number of new political actors that offer to reduce the cognitive cost of evaluating option, but
aren’t politicians and parties that can be noted on the paper ballot still good enough to solve all our
political problems?
Only the fourth step, the study of social structure, turns a nice-to-have ability of the web to add to an
improvement of democratic political procedures into a normative necessity. Individualization has
ended the partinioning nature of Western societies – most people are no longer satisfied with being
represented by one group and one group only. And globalization brings societies into the demand for
democratic participation who did never have the European tradition of group representation. While
social structure demands and the web already for quite some time mirrors general network
structures, political decisions are still made using partitioning representation. And this neglect of the
capabilities of the web may result, and seems to result empirically, in decreasing legitimacy,
alienation and hostility of voters, topic neglect, and polarization.
Political processes that use the web to solve these problems have, however, to employ an
individualized storage of trust relations. On one hand, this is only another example of something the
web already offers. On the other hand, it is still a taboo that is probably responsible for the fact that
the potential the web offers to solve some of the most pressing political problems of our time has
not yet been tackled. As privacy and the secrecy of the ballot are important and hacking a real threat,
these problems will have to be tackled with high priority. But they cannot longer be an argument to
block considering web-related solutions to restore the performance of the political process in times
of indvidualization and globalization.
Scholtz Can the Internet Improve Politics? 10
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