The Politics of Information

The Case of the European Union

T. Blom, S. Vanhoonacker, T. Blom, S. Vanhoonacker

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137325419
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This collection presents the results of a research agenda which examines how information plays a key role in policymaking. As a very dynamic environment characterized by many different modes of information gathering and processing, the EU forms a particularly interesting case to test the politics of information approach.

1

The Politics of Information: A New Research Agenda

Tannelie Blom and Sophie Vanhoonacker

The Politics of Information: The Case of the European Union presents the results of a research agenda that focuses on European institutions and their bureaucratic organizations as a complex, polycentric system of information processing geared to producing and implementing collectively binding decisions. The sources of inspiration for this research agenda are diverse, but two rather general observations might be mentioned here. The first observation concerns a transformation of the domestic politics of Western societies. During the second half of the 20th century Western societies – alternately labelled as ‘post-industrial’, ‘information’, ‘knowledge’, and, more recently as ‘risk’ and ‘network societies’ – have been shifting from a top-down, command-and-control style of government to a politics based more on bargaining/negotiation/deliberation between public and private actors in which concern about the control over information and expertise is gradually replacing the erstwhile concern with the monopoly of the state of the legitimate means of (eventually violent) coercion (cf. Hooghe and Marks 2001, 5). As the German sociologist Stehr claims, ‘in knowledge societies, the balance in the uses of different forms of power changes; knowledge, rather than the more traditional forms of coercive power, becomes the dominant and preferred means of constraint and control of possible action’ (Stehr 1994, 168; cf. Willke 1997). This assessment of information and expertise as potent resources of political influence and (informal) power has been methodologically and theoretically cemented by, among other things, the different types of policy-network analysis and governance approaches that also have found their way into the study of EU politics.

A second observation that inspires the research agenda behind The Politics of Information: The Case of the European Union – this time ex negativo – concerns exactly that part of the scholarly literature on EU integration and politics that suggests that the importance and political potency of information and expertise increases once more when we enter the orbit of EU politics (e.g. Wessels 1996; Marks et al. 1996; Sandholtz 1996; Schaefer 1996; Blom 2005). At the core of this claim is the often-repeated statement that the EU’s structures of channelling and processing policy-relevant information tend to produce informational asymmetries that privilege the Brussels-based organizations. Emphasizing the role of the Commission bureaucracy in this respect, Alberta Sbragia, for example, remarked that ‘[i]t is difficult to think of any institution in any traditional state which has access to the diversity of information gathered by the Commission. ... The Commission as an institution is at the very heart of a vast web of information sources: information from member-states flows to Brussels rather than to other member-states’ (Sbragia 2000, 229). The European Commission is certainly still over-represented in this literature, but scholarly interest in the policy-making role of other important actors such as the Council Secretariat is increasing (Christiansen and Vanhoonacker 2008; Dijkstra 2008), showing that over the last two decades the Council Secretariat has developed as another centre of information processing. The same can be said about the European Parliament and its bureaucracy (Romanyshyn and Neuhold 2013). Moreover, it is not only member-state governments and domestic bureaucracies that are informing Europe’s institutions and bureaucracies. The literature on European interest groups portrays Brussels as being crowded by thousands of lobbyists trying to convert their specialist information and expertise into influence on policy processes in the interest of the groups and stakeholders they represent (Mazey and Richardson 2003; Greenwood 2007).

This picture of ‘Brussels’ as a veritable hothouse of information processing, the central junction of the EU political system where massive streams of politically relevant communication of a most varied origin come together, fuse, and condense, may well be valid and instructive. The question is, however, what do we actually know about the way in which apparently relevant ‘information’ is accessed, structured, channelled, and processed with a view to the formulation, legal design, and implementation/enforcement of EU policies? Relatedly, if the system of informing the participants in the EU policy-making process in fact bears on the question ‘who gets what, when, and how?’, what then do we know about the politics of information in the EU?

Following the good old textbook wisdom that ‘[t]he first and perhaps most important resources of the bureaucracy are information and expertise.’ (Peters 2001a [1995], 234; cf. Weber 1978 [1922], 225), it may well be appreciated, at least intuitively, that the presumed informational asymmetries and the expertise to exploit them enable the Commission and the Council Secretariat not only to have an impact on the policy agenda of the EU (cf. Cram 1994, 211) but also allow them to play a substantial role in the decisional phase of the policy process, even in areas where they formally have no say (Pollack 1997, 2003; Beach 2005). Yet, again, the existence of informational asymmetries and surpluses of knowledge and expertise that may privilege certain categories of participants in the European policy process should not be assumed a priori; their formation and distribution has to be investigated empirically (cf. Waterman and Meier 1998). That is at least the scholarly credo at the heart of the ‘politics of information’ approach to EU policy-making. It is inspired by empirical, theoretical, and normative interests:

•in the concrete structures and dynamics of accessing, encoding, channelling, and synthesizing information, including its translation into proposals for (courses of) legislative and judicial action as means of achieving specific societal objectives via the political system of the EU;

•in the eventual selectivity and biases of these processes_;

•in the distribution of informational surpluses and asymmetries over the EU polity;

•in the attempts to exploit informational asymmetries/surpluses with a view to achieving specific policy outcomes;

•and in the attempts of democratically legitimized political principals like member-state governments and the European Parliament to control these processes and prevent their abuse in the form of ‘bureaucratic politics’ based on informational asymmetries.

How to approach questions like these? Though this introductory chapter is not meant to impose a theoretical straightjacket for all other contributions to this volume, the following sections set out some conceptual clarifications and provide a general orientation and better understanding of what a ‘politics of information’ approach may mean concretely when applied to different institutional and policy contexts. In addition, a number of questions have been identified that are aimed at giving direction to the different empirical chapters. Following a definition of the concept of information and its relation to closely related concepts such as knowledge and data, we look into the political dimension of institutionalization and standardization processes. In an attempt to come up with a concrete way to operationalize the study of the politics of information, we advocate an in-depth study of how the rules of the game underlying means of information-gathering and processing are constructed (constitutive politics) and how they are applied in practice (operational politics).

‘Information’ from a semantic perspective

The introduction to a volume that centres on information processing and its politics can hardly avoid taking issue with the concept ‘information’ and how it relates to other concepts such as knowledge and data. At the same time, this is not the place to offer a complete analysis of what ‘information’ may mean. Starting with the groundbreaking work of scientists like Hartley, Turing, Von Neumann, Weaver, and Shannon, the concept of ‘information’ has caused an intellectual pandemic that still has not subsided. ‘Information’ is of course central to the information and computer sciences founded by these pioneers, but it has also infected economics, biology, psychology, the study of organizations, linguistics, neurophysiology, didactics, philosophy, and so forth (cf. Young 1987; Dick 2002). Instead of a full-blown exploration, we will take some drastic shortcuts, starting with a limitation on what ‘information’ might mean for the social sciences.

We assume that as a rule – and quite differently from, for example, forensic pathologists – social scientists are not so much interested in the purely physical interactions among human beings as in the symbolically mediated forms of interaction that may be referred to in a general sense as ‘communication processes’ (including forms of non-lingual communication). It is, after all, via communication, oral and written, that the members of a social collectivity coordinate and integrate their actions, including those actions that are not communicative or ‘social’ but which transform elements and structures of their ‘natural’ environment. Accordingly, social scientists may be concerned with the concept of information insofar as it relates to, or identifies, components and functions of communication processes and their structures.

Moreover, following basic insights of pragmatically oriented philosophers of language like Bühler, Austin, Searl, Tugendhat, or Habermas, it is assumed that every communication ‘informs’ at least at two different levels.¹ The ‘performative’ or ‘illocutionary’ aspect of a communication informs the addressee(s) about the type of (speech) act the speaker intends to perform with his or her utterance: to give a command, to put a question, to make a statement, and so forth. Yet, whether we are commanding, questioning, stating, or whatever other speech acts we are performing, every communication also has a propositional component (Austin 1975: a ‘constatative’ or ‘locutionary’ aspect), the meaning of which suggests a ‘state of affairs’. Statements like ‘the door is open’ typically accentuate the state of affairs that is suggested by their propositional content – in this case that there is a door and that this door is open. But speech acts we classify as ‘commanding’ or ‘putting a question’ also exhibit an informational content. The command ‘Close the door!’ also suggests that there is a door and that this door is open, but, moreover, that this door can be closed. The question ‘What is the chance for survival of the herring swimming in the North Sea?’ suggests that there is a type of fish commonly classified as herring; that there is a particular sea where they live, the North Sea; that their survival in that sea is not guaranteed, and so on.

Against this background, ‘information’ can be defined as the ‘state of affairs’ conveyed by the meaning of the propositional content of a communication as understood by the members of a lingo-cultural community. To preclude any misunderstandings, the notion ‘state of affairs’ does not connote the existence ‘somewhere out there’ of an x that has the quality P, or of a relation R that holds between an entity a and an entity b, or whatever other type of ‘facts’ may exist. As understood in this context, a ‘state of affairs’ is just a possible feature or condition of the world, suggested by a combination of subject and predicate terms, including, as may be the case, any quantifying or modal expressions; possible, that is, according to the grammar and semantics of the language we share. As such, ‘states of affairs’ cannot be ‘true’ or ‘false’; only statements can be true or false. But then the pragmatic sense of stating is exactly to claim that the state of affairs suggested is in fact the case.

On this reading, ‘information’ is not the same as ‘knowledge’, at least not as long as ‘knowledge’ is associated with beliefs about the world that, for whatever reason, are taken to be ‘true’ or ‘valid’. Yet, as we shall see below, ‘information’ and ‘knowledge’ maintain a special relation to each other. For now it may suffice to point out that in order to leave ‘traces’, information has to be transformed into knowledge, it has to become a component of our normative, cognitive, or evaluative assumptions about ‘the world’. After all, communications realize themselves in the form of events that already start to disappear the moment they come into existence. Being a component of communication, ‘information’ leads a similarly transient life. Yet, in the transition from information to knowledge, memory functions and capacities play a crucial role and the main function of memory systems is not to remember, but (fortunately!) to forget (cf. Luhmann 2000b, 140 ff).

Given the debate in knowledge-management literature that was sparked by Langefors’s (1973) ‘infological equation’, we cannot avoid taking into account the term ‘data’. What does ‘data’ mean or refer to? It depends, one could say. One may use the expression ‘data’ synonymously with ‘information’ as defined above; we are after all not quarreling about words, but about concepts. Yet from an etymological perspective – ‘data’ is the plural of ‘datum’, past participle of the Latin dare that connotes ‘given’, ‘a given’, and so on – it seems more natural to use ‘data’ to refer to states of affairs we assume, for whatever reason, to indeed be the case, for what we accept as ‘facts’. In the context of statistics and the knowledge-management literature, however, ‘data’ becomes a more technical concept referring to the qualitative and quantitative values of variables or to decontextualized components of the propositional content of statements. Yet there is nothing ‘raw’ about data in this more technical sense. On the contrary, data and databases are often highly sophisticated constructions, founded on knowledge and information. As, for example, Tuomi (1999, 108) puts it, ‘data are created from information by putting information into a predefined data structure that completely defines its meaning. Instead of being raw material for information, data emerge as a result of adding value to information by putting it into a form that can be automatically processed.’

‘Information’ from a pragmatic perspective

It may certainly be useful, if not necessary, to define what we mean in a semantic or lexical sense with the term ‘information’. However, as social scientists we are primarily interested in the way in which information is used and how it functions in the concrete interactions of social collectives. As political scientists in particular, we are interested in pragmatic questions such as:

•What leads policy-makers to accept certain information as valid, that is, as presenting a fact or an appropriate specification of the organization’s goals and values?

•How do policy-making systems distinguish between relevant and irrelevant information?

•What constitutes the operational value of information, that is, how and why does it prompt (courses of) action/decision-making?

•Why do political and bureaucratic decision-makers have an almost insatiable hunger for information?

•How do modern (i.e. computer- and Internet-supported) information management technologies bear on the behaviour of policy-makers?

•And so forth.

Questions like these require, of course, robust empirical research and cannot be handled by sheer conceptual analysis. It may, however, be useful to return once more to the relation between information and knowledge, but now from a pragmatic perspective.

Following March and Simon (1993 [1958]), we may think about the function of information within an organization in terms of a ‘stimulus’ that evokes a specific course of action, or, in the terms of Mackay (1969), as triggering a ‘state of conditional readiness for goal directed activities’. Yet, to have a practical effect, or, with a view to organizations/institutions, ‘operational value’, it should be possible to relate incoming information to an already existing framework of knowledge, especially to those components of it that (as logicians would say) have a universal structure (for all x: if A(x) then B(x)). Note that this holds not only for individual actors but for organizations as well. In a variation on Kettinger and Li (2010, 413), the operational value that information may have for (the members of) an organization is a joint product of that information and the available organizational knowledge. Put differently, organizational knowledge presents the framework through which information may prompt a specific decision or course of action.

For an organization, knowledge is not only available in the form of the knowledge of its individual members and of (at least partially) shared cognitive and normative beliefs (cf. Corner et al. 1994), organizational knowledge is also present in the organization’s goals, routines, standard operating procedures, strategies, self-descriptions (organizational chart!), established classifications, and so forth. It manifests itself, among other ways, in two types of ‘rules’ with a universal tendency: conditional rules and effect rules (Mackay 1969; Luhmann 2000b; Kettinger and Li 2010). In their most simple form, conditional rules have the following structure: if X is the case then do/decide Y. For example: if the number of articles of type Q on stock is lower than 20, then order 40 of them. Effect rules are of the form: if X is the objective then do/decide Y in order to realize X. For example: if it is the objective to produce in an environment-friendly way, then chemical Z should be bought (instead of chemical W).

Both types of rules find backup in more generalized, normative and cognitive beliefs about, respectively, the values and goals that are appropriate for the organization and about cause/effect and means/end relations. Not unimportantly, these generalized normative and cognitive expectations proactively establish in a preliminary fashion what information may be relevant for an organization. Information has organizational relevance, one might say, insofar as the organization perceives ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  The Politics of Information: A New Research Agenda
• Part I  Conceptual and Historical Reflections
• Part II  Institutions
• Part III  Interests and Expertise
• Part IV  Informing the Public
• Part V  Information in the Fields of Foreign Policy and Security
• Bibliography
• Index