Dial D for Democracy

By Philip Elmer-DeWitt

Imagine it is 1994. The economy is still stagnating, Japan remains in the doldrums as well, interest rates are rising, and the deficit has reached $600 billion. Something has to be done -- and quickly. President Ross Perot, making good on a campaign promise, gets on the horn to the TV networks and organizes one of his famous electronic town meetings. That night, before a television audience Murphy Brown would die for, he lays out the nation's precarious economic situation and the stark choices the U.S. confronts. Even before his presentation is over, the returns begin to pour in -- by telephone, fax, computer modem, videophone and two-way interactive cable TV. By morning, the will of the American people is clear: they have decided to cut back on Social Security payments, further slash military spending and raise their own taxes.

That's how teledemocracy is supposed to work, according to Perot, the billionaire computer executive and putative presidential candidate. The concept has a certain gut-level appeal. To voters fed up with the paralysis of Congress and the special-interest outrages that characterize politics-as- usual, the idea that the citizenry might bypass all the musty machinery of representative democracy and directly influence the government seems enormously attractive.

In speeches and interviews, Perot implies that the technology required to create an electronic town meeting is already in place -- an impression reinforced by events like his much ballyhooed satellite broadcast last Friday that linked Perot rallies in six different states. Participants in five U.S. cities could hear one another cheer the candidate as he spoke to them from Orlando. To have a truly interactive town meeting, however, a number of technical barriers must still be hurdled. And even if that happens, it is not at all clear that the result will be any way to run a country.

When he describes his plan for taking the pulse of the people, Perot seems to assume that viewers will have access to some sort of interactive television network. Such a system would allow couch spuds to register their opinions simply by pressing a button on a keyboard or remote control. Unfortunately, interactive television does not yet exist -- except in a handful of small pilot projects -- and it has not been determined who will provide the service when it does arrive.

The phone companies and cable-TV systems are jockeying for position in what each views as a potentially vast market but which neither is ready to create. Stuart Brotman, a communications specialist in Lexington, Mass., estimates that cable operators would have to spend $20 billion to $30 billion on digital-compression and fiber-optic technology to prepare their systems for interactive programming. The telephone companies, for their part, would have to invest $300 billion to $500 billion in fiber-optic networks before they could deliver TV-quality pictures into every American's home.

You don't need interactive TV or videophones to have a town meeting, of course. An effect similar to the one Perot describes could be achieved using standard broadcast television and some form of telephone communication -- fax, phone or modem. But the long-distance phone networks work on the assumption that not everybody will call at once. If masses of people dial simultaneously, the lines quickly get jammed. After President Bush's State of the Union address last January, for instance, cbs broadcast a toll-free 800 number and invited viewers to respond to questions posed by Charles Kuralt. Of the 25 million calls that were made, only 315,000 got through.

President Perot would not need to go national with every issue, however. If he wanted to poll the leaders of the Fortune 500 companies on their willingness to limit the compensation of top executives, for example, he could do it with a fax machine and receive their answers by return fax. If they agreed, he could go on TV to announce their support for new legislation capping ceo salaries at $1 million.

For more freewheeling discussions he might plug into an electronic-mail or bulletin-board system, such as Prodigy or CompuServe. These interconnected matrices of computers allow participants to exchange written opinions at any time and from any place without ever having to meet face to face. On such networks a future President could quickly tap the views of ordinary citizens and of specialists at universities and think tanks across the U.S.

But strange things happen when people communicate electronically, some of which do not bode well for teledemocracy. Anybody who has spent much time on the national bulletin-board systems knows that people on these networks are more likely to express anger or enthusiasm than they would in normal conversation. Social scientists Lee Sproull and Sara Kiesler, who have spent more than a decade studying electronic-mail communities, suggest that without the visual cues that are so abundant in personal meetings, people behave much differently. When you cannot see the facial expressions that tell you when you're hurting someone's feelings, it's easy to drive a point too far. Without countervailing opinions, it's easy to take extreme, exaggerated positions -- to "flame," in the jargon of the hacker. Lines get drawn. Sides get taken. Individuals -- and sometimes whole groups -- get ostracized.

On Prodigy, for instance, there have been outbreaks of anti-Semitism and even mass paranoia (based on a rumor that the network's central office was spying on people's personal files). "The potential for good -- and for mischief -- is very high," says Kiesler.

Video town meetings provide some of the cues missing in computer conferences, but they have their own inherent dangers. It takes time to present all sides of a complex issue fairly, and the answers depend on how and when the questions are posed. In the ideal electronic forum, a problem like balancing the budget or reforming health care should be raised and thoroughly debated by many people over a period of weeks, says Lloyd Morrisett, president of the Markle Foundation, which specializes in studying the role of the media in politics. "You have to allow time for information to penetrate the social fabric," he explains. If people are asked to make snap judgments, the risk of demagoguery is great. It was Hitler, after all, who pioneered the electronic referendum, using radio broadcasts to drum up votes for plebiscites supporting his rise to power.

The Founding Fathers did not have computers or cable TV. But they did have some experience with crowds and mass behavior. From this they concluded that people were too easily swayed by passion to be entrusted with direct democracy. The government they fashioned was not a national town meeting, in which everybody votes on issues, but a representative democracy, in which lawmaking power is entrusted to elected officials and constrained by a system of checks and balances to ensure that decisions are not too hastily made.

The very things that disgruntled citizens decry in representative democracy -- namely that it often leads to paralysis and a tendency to cater to narrow interest groups -- are also the source of its strength. Checks and balances guard against popular whims and demagoguery while protecting minority groups from tyranny by the majority. "Look at history," says James David Barber, professor of political science at Duke University. "The reality of human experience is that emotional responses have turned to utter tragedy time and time again."

It may be inevitable that the U.S. will eventually adopt some forms of electronic government; American politics is already dominated by video sound bites and computerized polls. But the challenge to the nation -- and to candidate Perot -- will be to use the new technology to support representative democracy, not subvert it.