tedrick@ernie.berkeley.edu.BERKELEY.EDU (Tom Tedrick) (03/06/86)
OK, I am in a mood to argue about how Democracies can be corrupted. My particular interest is in the role of information in this process. Relatively free exchange of information is characteristic of democracies, since in order to make intelligent political decisions, the voters need information. The first thing that comes to mind is how to manipulate the information available to the voters, so as to influence their political views. Assuming intelligence is normally distributed (roughly), the majority of the voting population in a democracy is likely to be less than brilliant. So rather than appealing to reason or the most intelligent voters, politicians have an incentive to present information which will appeal to the masses. This information is often simplistic or misleading. I hope that is enough to start some kind of argument going. If not I will provoke the democrats further :-) I'd like to look at one recent example: I hear Kurt Waldheim is running for office in Austria, and is in a close race with elections coming up shortly (as an aside I was in Austria last year, and even then it seemed like there were political posters in lots of places, although I don't read German so the meaning was unclear to me). So all of a sudden, right before the election, information about alleged Nazi activities is inserted into the media. This is a great trick for manipulating an election. Even if the info is false it will be hard to explain away before the election. If the info is misleading it will also be difficult to come up with a good story. In any case it looks like a nice tactic to throw the election to the socialists. Now who will benefit from tilting the election to the Socialists? Probably not Israel, it doesn't seem likely they have anything to gain by doing this. Well, who else then besides the Soviets? Note: this information is 40 years old. Who had it all this time, why wasn't it released earlier? It looks like a classic case of destabilization by releasing information at a critical moment. Since democracies are vulnerable to exploitation of mass psychology in this way, they are inherently prone to instability.