Political Portals and Democracy: Threats and Promises

Steven M. Schneider
sschneider@asc.upenn.edu
Dr. Schneider is the Editor of NetElection.org and a Research Fellow at the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania (2000-2001). He is currently on leave from his position as Associate Professor of Political Science, SUNY Institute of Technology at Utica/Rome.

The appearance of commercial political portals in the 2000 campaign season raises a serious question about the Internet and democratic practice. What if sites such as grassroots.com and voter.com succeed in capturing the attention and loyalty of citizens seeking data and information about candidates, issues and policy outcomes? What mechanisms are in place to ensure that these sites make significant and positive contributions to the political process? Clearly, this is not the "same old story" about politics and the media. In fact, what we have is the emergence of a new category of storytellers. Political portals exist in the vortex between web sites produced by professional media outlets, candidates for elective office, activist groups and advocacy organizations. Increasingly, they seek to bridge political action and political information-seeking. In the 1996 and 1998 cycles, political portals were significant but functioned mostly as off-shoots of other sites or ventures sponsored by nonprofit organizations. This year, several dot-coms have entered the marketplace, bringing into sharp relief the contrasting economic and political motivations of site producers.

Political portals pose two main threats to good democratic practice. The first is opacity -- blocking or obscuring information about the motivations, biases and policies that guide the sites' production. The second threat is redlining: declaring some candidates, issues or positions "out of bounds" and not providing coverage of them. Opacity and redlining reduce the ability of the Internet to promote affordable free speech for candidates, advocacy groups and citizens, and may serve to increase voter confusion, cynicism, and complacency. Opacity is easily rectified. Promoting practices of transparency -- and convincing site producers that it is in their best interests to be transparent -- will lead to political portals that inform rather than obscure, and make positive rather than negative contributions to the process. Redlining is more difficult to remedy, and may be more amenable to an indirect solution involving database structures and access.

This article examines the political economy of political portals. The next section examines political portals in terms of the motivations of site producers, and suggests a distinction between public interest, advocacy and for-profit sites. In the following section, issues of transparency and opacity are discussed. The final section addresses redlining, and suggests an open access database structure as one potential solution to some of the difficulties raised.

Public Interest, Advocacy or Profit: Motivations of Political Portal Producers

One way to categorize political portals is by examining the motivations behind the site producers. Some producers aim to serve the public interest, and disavow any connection to policy outcomes or profit. Others are part of organizations with clearly defined and well-articulated public policy agendas. Finally, a third category of sites are intended to contribute to the well-being of for-profit corporations by generating revenues, site traffic or corporate goodwill.

The first political portals billed themselves as "public interest" sites. These organizations tend to operate as nonprofits, and do not accept advertising. They define their task as offering complete and non-biased information about candidates, office-holders and elections. The organizations are usually funded by foundation grants and member contributions, and operate on low-cost or volunteer labor.

In the 2000 campaign, Project Vote Smart remains an active example of this genre. Vote-Smart provides citizens with detailed information about candidates, elected officials and the political system. The primary means of entry into the system is zip code database that identifies elected officials and candidates for president, U.S. Congress, governor and state office. For each, biographical, campaign finance, issue position, special interest group ratings and voting records are provided. The site also provides the status of legislation pending in the U.S. Congress across a wide range of issues, as well as detailed voter registration information.

The second category of political portals encompass those sites sponsored by organizations who seek to influence elections and public policy debates by informing voters and citizens, and encouraging political action in support of their agendas. A large number of advocacy organizations and membership associations have dedicated portions of their web sites to political information, such as the AARP, NRA and AFL-CIO.

The AARP uses its site to encourage "informed participation" and the creation of a "dialogue" with federal candidates yielding clear statements on issues of concern to the leading organization of older Americans. The site offers an extensive series of election "issue briefs," and uses a database linking zip codes to federal candidates. It does not, however, provide an opportunity to determine how candidates stand on specific issues. The AARP site also provides facilities to write letters to members of Congress and to obtain detailed legislative status of currently pending bills.

The most significant development in this election cycle is the emergence of a substantial for-profit political portal sector. Some are "pure political" web-based businesses. Companies such as Grassroots.com (Grassroots.com, DNet), Speakout.com (Speak Out.com, GoVote.com), VoxCap.com (VoxCap.com, Policy.com, IntellectualCapital.com, CongressVote.com) politics.com and voter.com hope to turn a profit by selling advertising on sites focused on politics and political information.

These companies face significant competition from a second group of for-profit political portals functioning as ancillaries to web sites designed for other purposes (and thus benefiting from potential cross-subsidies across business units). Industry sectors sponsoring for-profit political portals include media [All Politics (CNN), OnPolitics (Washington Post)], web portals [Yahoo! Politics (Yahoo!), Election2000.AOL (AOL)], identity portals [iVillage Election 2000 (iVillage.com), PlanetOut News & Politics (PlanetOut.com)] and political services companies [VoteNet (Netivation.com)].

The for-profit political portals generally share a set of common features. Most provide similar political information, including current news headlines and stories, elected official and candidate listings by zip code, issue summaries, candidate profiles, election results and extensive links to other political sites. Several of the portals also attempt to facilitate political action by supporting community building and contacting elected officials and media organizations.

Why Motivations Matter: The Threats of Opacity and Redlining

Good democratic practice requires that information sources be clear about the source of and selection procedures for information presented and the use made of information collected. Blocking or obscuring this information results in opaque sites; clearly identifying the motivations, biases and policies that guide the sites' production results in transparent sites. While it is clear that traditional media outlets are not as transparent as they could be, we have an opportunity with the Internet to raise the bar of public expectations about political information.

Opacity is particularly insidious on political portals. With other types of political web sites -- sponsored by candidates, or advocacy organizations, or political parties, for example -- the interests and biases of the site producer is clear. Citizens are unlikely to be surprised by the absence of a link to an opponent on a candidate site. This is the expected (if regrettable) behavior of candidates, but it is not profit-seeking behavior.

For-profit political portals, however, can be expected to act as rational political and economic actors. The contrasting motivations among the public interest, advocacy and for-profit organizations producing these sites will have an impact on the level of transparency and the breadth of information provided. Again, transparency refers to the clarity about information on the site: the source and bias of information presented, and the use made of information collected. Breadth addresses the width of the political horizon presented: are all possibilities addressed, or only a few? This is where the issue of redlining arises. If a site does not provide some facet of information, and does not divulge its editorial policy for excluding it, visitors are deprived not only of the content of that information, but even of the realization that such points of view exist.

Public interest sites take as their mandate the provision of information in as complete a form as possible. For example, Vote-Smart identifies 172 presidential candidates, Yahoo! Politics lists 22, voter.com 11, and AARP 3 (Bush, Gore and Keyes). A reasonable inference is that public interest groups do not make editorial judgments about the viability of campaigns, while for-profit and advocacy groups do.

The transparency or opacity of a political portal can be described in terms of five key issues. Some of them can be readily identified by their presence or absence on a site. Others require more perception, being more inherent in the use of text and editorial direction.

First and foremost, the ownership of the site should be clearly stated, and the purpose of the site provided. The mission of a site may well include engaging political discourse and providing information, but if the primary purpose is to garner advertising revenues, that too should be clear. (Admittedly, most consumers of traditional media do not view the goal of the evening newscasts as delivering an audience, but illiteracy in one medium should not be cause for encouraging illiteracy in another.)

A second source of opacity, especially with respect to traditional media, like CNN, Washington Post and other familiar "brands", stems from brand confusion. Media companies using their brands to leverage into the provision of new types of information do not maintain their familiar and known journalistic ethics. For example, the Post might maintain strict editorial discretion on its news pages, but not on its forum pages. What expectations does a visitor to the site have about the accuracy and integrity of the posting? Does the Post or other media outlets screen or filter contributions to its forums? Is this information prominently available on the site?

The third issue concerns advertising. It is often unclear what information is provided by the site owner, and what information is provided by a paying advertiser. For example, the for-profit sites provide links to candidate sites -- but at what cost? Are these links advertising? If they are provided as a public service, are the links selected from among the potential links, using editorial discretion? A related issue is of particular concern on advocacy sites. Is it clear that the goal of the site is to influence public policy and affect policy outcomes? Is it clear that the entire story is not presented, or that a particular perspective is presented more favorably?

Similarly, for all portal sites, the question of breadth arises. How broad is the set of issue positions presented? How broad is the set of issues and candidates and parties and organizations? What are the selection criteria? And most importantly, are the selection criteria made explicit?

Finally, political portals threaten democratic practice with poorly defined and articulated privacy policies. Privacy is used here very broadly, and concerns any and all information collected by a site for internal or external use. We are not concerned here only with information that can be tied to a specific individual. Privacy policies ought to be explicit and complete. Voter.com -- which provides a lengthy privacy policy on its site -- collects personalized information when users register for its services, which is not to be disclosed to "third parties." However, it is not clear if "sponsoring organizations" are considered "third parties" or not. On most of the portal sites, it is not clear what happens to the collected information -- is it used for GOTV, voter recruitment, funds solicitation, and membership recruitment? Are composite tallies created and presented to policy makers as "evidence" of grassroots feelings and beliefs?

In addition to the problems of transparency, the opaque, commercially driven models of dot-com political portals present problems of access to the new commons of the Internet. If certain candidates, parties, and ideologies are always presented at the expense of others due to supposed commercial viability, and if the public is unaware of this selection process, some of the most promising features of the Internet for engaging new political interest and activism will be thwarted. Rather than bemoan the shortcomings of the commercial model, we raise the question of how the political portal model can be used to further the positive development of Internet-based democracy. How can we use a combination of public interest, advocacy and for-profit portals to do so? The answers may lie in the database structures that underlie the portals themselves.

It is helpful to disaggregate the political portal and take a look at its component parts. Several of the features of political portals are provided by third party vendors, some of whom provide services across multiple portals. For example, many portals get news headlines from services such as moreover.com, and community-building features from affiliates like politicalwag.com. Most importantly, basic elected official/candidate databases are provided by companies such as Netivation and Capitol Advantage. The basic information database for most people entering the portals is a look-up of their elected officials and candidates, obtained by entering a zip+4. Basic candidate and elected official information includes the name, address, web site, office held or sought, state, and district.

Providing access to the candidates' basic database may allow groups currently shut out from the major portals entrée to the online political community. Although any organization can purchase this basic database and add additional fields ("columns") to it (such as a ranking of candidates for Congress on some particular set of criteria), these organizations do not likely have the resources to compete with the dot-coms. What if this list of candidates were treated as a public good and made available for free to any organization that wished to add columns to the basic database? The additional columns could be marketed by the original owners of the database to other sites, as well as made available to public interest political portals.

This would provide the benefit not only of permitting greater access for smaller groups to the online discourse, but would remove database companies from the business of editorial discretion. In essence, they would treat their database as a "common carrier" of political information, available to all who wished to use it. The new voices could add value to the underlying database, thus providing the companies with new profit opportunities.

Conclusion

The emergence of the political portals -- and, in particular, the dot-coms of this genre -- provide opportunities to use the Internet to encourage sound democratic practice. Transparent sites that explain their editorial polities, shed light on their selection criteria, and make clear their privacy policies, will contribute to a citizenry that is more informed about both politics and the Internet. Open-access database structures will contribute to the vibrancy of political debate and deliberation, and make considerable progress toward an environment of affordable free speech.

While there has been copious discussion of how the new interactive technologies of the Internet may or may not revolutionize political participation, the promise does not lie only in the ease of use for end-users. Fringe voices still need access to ears and eyeballs, and to do so must often compete within the rules of the dot-com culture. Opening access to underlying databases can provide new venues for political groups, as well as new revenue opportunities for companies still trying to work out the profit potential of the World Wide Web. Political culture, technical structures, and Internet access are all elements that require consideration in deploying new messages. Opening the underlying databases of the portals creates new levels of access in the online political community.

Political portals based on principles of transparency and open-access are clearly in the public's interest. The dot-coms need to be convinced that it is in their private interests to support these principles as well -- that they can do well by doing good.

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