Information Flow
Identical democracies with different information flow will manifest completely differently. Take one with a free media and independent education structure and contrast it with another that has state-run media and a state-mandated curriculum. In the latter case, the governing party will be incentivized to leverage state control of information to consolidate power within the electorate. This can be seen in the U.S., which has partial state control of education systems. Attempts at power consolidation can be observed through differences in textbooks created by the same publishers in California and Texas, with the former pushing a clearly liberal agenda on children and the latter promoting conservative policies.
The importance of information flows is not relegated to state-level governance structures. Consider family offices: A family office that openly shares board meeting minutes with the family and is transparent about how money is being invested is going to have a very different character than one that limits such information to only those involved in active management.
Information Asymmetry
In addition to playing out at both the level of the nation state and small governance structures, some governing structures intentionally incorporate information asymmetry into their operations—or may be riddled with it as an unintentional artifact that could have been avoided with more intentional design.
For an example of intentional information asymmetry, consider how things may have played out in the U.S. if Donald Trump had had full access to any information associated with an investigation into him. For a close-to-home example of unintentional asymmetries, think of the dearth of information sharing between agencies created by a model that encouraged inter-agency competition leading up to the 9-11 attacks and how that lack of cooperation shaped the U.S. government.
Handling Disinformation
The manner in which a system punishes disinformation significantly impacts outcomes. How would your family office, company, or nonprofit punish someone for lying or omitting information? The answer to that question will determine the fidelity of the information the governing body will utilize to operate.
The negative impact of disinformation should not be underplayed when determining how fastidious a governance system will be with its rules. Firing a CEO for lying to a board can, as an individual decision, seem more likely to hurt a company more than help it—however, if the action is not taken, all information fidelity in the organization will take a hit once it becomes clear that rules around lying can be bent for important employees.
That said, fidelity of information flows can be ensured by means other than punishing misinformation or omissions—such as relying on redundancies in information flow pathways.
Even allowing idle gossip to reach the ears of decision makers can have significant effects. Consider a study published by Baum et al. in the journal Emotion that found people to be heavily influenced by gossip and accusations even when the information is presented as untrustworthy. Simply tagging a source of information as unreliable to a decision maker is not enough to prevent them from acting on it. A governance structure that takes this kind of bias into account can be observed in the U.S. court system, which does not allow trials to proceed after jurors have been biased and disallows media access on a trial to jurors during the trial.
Informational Echo Chambers
There is a general belief in Western societies that a lack of state control over information flows is always a good thing. While it is true that state-controlled information flows always bias information to suit the existing power structure of a governance, it is not true they are always worse than the alternative. For example, commercially owned media sources are more likely to become biased toward sensationalist stories—as that is what they are rewarded for. Similarly, private educational channels are more likely to become more polluted with disinformation than those run by the state. When you remove a government-mandated curriculum, you don’t automatically get a more educated populace.
This is a particular area of interest in the context of social media platforms. A great article in Nature by Stewart et al. explores how information gerrymandering in social networks skews collective decision-making.[[33]](#_ftn33) It has long been known that people gravitate toward ideologically aligned content and friends on social media, creating “filter bubbles” that limit information exposure and foster political polarization, but in this paper Stewart et al. demonstrate that, through misunderstanding the general opinion of the larger populace, gridlock becomes more likely as filter bubbles make it harder to see what compromises are actually necessary to achieve the end goal. Stewart et al. demonstrated this using both mathematical models and real-world population groups. Perhaps governments of the future will enforce a certain percentage of “random friends” on social networking platforms to ensure this kind of informational gerrymandering does not happen.
Informational Filters on Those Given Power
Governing bodies will be significantly influenced by any informational filter imposed on those given positions of power. This can work in a negative context, like the Khmer Rouge filtering educated individuals out of positions of management, or in a positive context, as was the case in the Chinese Imperial examinations during the Han dynasty. Even though the examinations did not test for technical expertise, they did test for general intelligence and ensured a common culture among the ruling class leading to cohesion in action. Sometimes cohesion in action can be more effective than technical correctness of action when it comes to maintaining peace and stability.
Vote Transparency
Transparency—or lack thereof—will alter voting behavior. A simple example of this is seen with dot-voting, in which individuals take a dot sticker and place it on a quadrant on a sheet of paper representing what they want to vote for. The information about how other people are voting is actively displayed the moment they vote and thus will inevitably influence behavior. It will also affect trust in the voting system.
In a particularly vivid example of how exposure to other people publicly voicing their opinion can warp an individual perception, consider the Asch conformity experiments. Researchers presented three lines of clearly different lengths to participants, who were asked which of the three is the same length as a fourth line. The difference in line length was apparent that any child could get the answer right, but when participants heard other fake participants consistently give the wrong answer first, 75% of them eventually started giving the wrong answer themselves. How do you share information between stakeholders in a governance system without overbiasing them?
One system meant to correct for this effect is the Delphi method. In the Delphi method, experts are asked for their opinion on a subject. These opinions are then anonymized and shared with an expert panel with the same question then being asked of them again. This grants participants a chance to revise their answers. Over time, their answers will change and presumably converge on something more accurate.
We will dive more into other potential solutions for the above dilemmas as the book winds to a close.