V. Civic Capacity and Infrastructure

If democracy requires mutually-binding consultation as described in Part I above, a key component of this consultation between state and society is the civic infrastructure: how the informal social institutions enable (or undermine) the ability of constituents to organize, exercise political agency, and shape the exercise of political power. Pathologies of civic infrastructure can undermine democracy by deepening disparities of political power and voice, and by undermining the ways in which political debates and constituency demands translate into political action. In particular, attention to civic infrastructure points us towards the issues arising from civil society organizing, political parties, and the media infrastructure.

With respect to civil society, a key challenge for democracy is the disparity in political influence between different constituencies. As noted in Part III above, the disproportionate political influence of business interests and corporate power, for example, can drive instances of political capture, and shape how policies can skew towards wealthier interests. This tendency is exacerbated by shifts that have undermined the broader ecosystem of civil society organizing. For example, as Skocpol and Putnam have documented, participation in civil society organizations created a civic fabric which served as a counter-weight to moneyed interests. But civic participation has over the last century shifted from mass member organizations to professionalized advocacy institutions. This decline in membership based political activity and civic associations over the last century has weakened an effective countervailing force against lobbying. Membership-based civic associations are where individuals historically gained knowledge, experience, and political efficacy.¹ This decline thus affects not just political culture, but also contributed to the decline in political countervailing power of workers and other constituencies, especially as political advocacy has shifted over the last half-century away from mass-member organizations to professionalized non-profit advocacy groups.² While these professionalized advocates can be more sophisticated in their lobbying campaigns, this shift has weakened the popular foundations that historically drove the political power of membership-based groups.³

Furthermore, this shift has also been engineered by power-shifting policy changes, for example through the promotion of tax cuts, right-to-work laws that fragment the ability of labor unions to exercise oppositional political power, and other similar shifts.⁴ Indeed, business interests have focused on policy changes that—like the busting of unions—undermine the countervailing power of labor and other rival interest groups.⁵

A related concern stems from the deterioration of social capital, which could be a contributing factor to democratic dysfunction. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) identifies social capital as “the links, shared values and understandings in society that enable individuals and groups to trust each other and so work together.”⁶ For some social capital scholars, declining forms of community participation in the late twentieth century—attendance at school or town hall meetings, membership in civic organizations with local chapters, active engagement in religious organizations, participation in team sports, entertaining of friends in the home, etc.—could be indicators of eroding communal bonds.⁷ This erosion could be troubling for democracy, for as Robert Putnam and others have long argued, social capital contributes to trust and reciprocity, and in turn helps explain democratic culture and long-term democratic durability.⁸ Both bridging social capital—bonds across lines of difference—and bonding social capital—deeper bonds within communities—are essential to democratic functioning. With this in mind, Putnam, like other social capital scholars, hearkens to the nineteenth and early twentieth century era of mass-membership organizations when Americans were the “joiners” within their community.⁹ This type of activity could serve as a way to insulate some of the effects of polarization described in Part II.

Similarly, another key dimension of civic infrastructure is the party system. Changes to the dynamics of modern American political parties have helped exacerbate some of the key dysfunctions of contemporary democratic politics. As noted in Part IV above, the deregulation of campaign financing and the proliferation of direct mass media communications through online tools like Facebook has weakened the gatekeeping power of political parties,¹⁰ which to some scholars has undermined the ability of parties to moderate extreme candidates.¹¹ At the same time, the modern party apparatus has arguably shifted to a more professionalized and insulated cadre, separated from the day-to-day experience of many voters.¹² Yet this decline of party capacity accompanies an increase in partisan identity and partisan polarization, further exacerbating scorched-earth politics between the two parties (See Part II above).

Third, a working and responsive democracy requires a media infrastructure that facilitates public debate and deliberation. From the print pamphlets of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the rise of the telegraph, radio, and broadcast television in the last century, technological changes to our media ecosystem have had major implications for the state of our democracy. Communications technologies enable new forms of association, debate, and civil society organization. But as these new technologies arise, they also create new forms of political communication, propaganda, and misinformation.

As digital media increasingly becomes readily accessible to the public, traditional media outlets that used to serve as gatekeepers of information, shaping and influencing the information made available to the public, have transitioned to being “gatewatchers,” where more individuals can set the agenda and disseminate information. Given the accessibility of digital media, decentralization of various diverse actors, and the unprecedented information available, the public can today customize the nature and content of the information it accesses, creating more fragmented political ideologies and instability.¹³ But as online platforms have a business model focused on data collection and the monetization of user interaction through selling ads, this creates incentives for the platforms and their algorithms to feed users ever-more extreme content in order to maximize user time on the platform. There is a risk of further filter bubbles which reinforce people’s existing dispositions and ideologies.¹⁴ Online communication through platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter create epistemic bubbles where groups systematically are constrained in interacting only with like-minded views, leading to greater polarization, insulation, and even radicalization (see Part II above).¹⁵ The result is an online public sphere essentially optimized for misinformation, disinformation, and polarization.¹⁶

Furthermore, these are not just new concerns for the era of online misinformation and fake news; similar concerns arose in the context of the rise of the telegraph and of radio over a century ago.¹⁷ The dynamics of fake news and weaponized use of political information is one that even in the modern era describes the strategic use of cable and print media in the late twentieth century to create similar filter bubble and polarization/radicalization dynamics.¹⁸ Indeed, the combination of cutting-edge digital tools with unrestricted dollars and influence on the right emboldens the contemporary alt-right and has helped fuel the rise of exclusionary populism described above. The power of conservative media—from Breitbart to Fox to talk radio—to amplify, reinforce, and create support for these viewpoints has been a key factor in the political impact of these movements.¹⁹

The changing media infrastructure also raises another parallel concern for democracy: the concentration of ownership and control over media institutions. A century ago, one of the central concerns of antitrust reformers worried about the rise of corporate power was the way in which new media barons like Robert Gould, who owned Western Union, could control the flow of information—and through it, the public sphere and the nature of democratic debate.²⁰ Today, a similar concern arises in the context of concentrated media ownership. In cable, radio, and print, media monopolies like Sinclair News mean that a relatively small number of firms and investors control the flow of information and the political content of many media outlets. Similarly, the rise of online platforms like Facebook and Alphabet’s YouTube also poses a concentration problem: these firms and their management of online algorithms exercise outsized influence on political speech. The result has been an increasingly cross-partisan concern with ownership and control of online speech.