Norms, Minorities, and Collective Choice Online

Abstract

M uch work in political science and political theory, ranging from the arguments of eighteenth-century political theorists, such as Condorcet and Rousseau, to modern social-choice theory, concerns the relationship between decision rules and collective choice. It is emphatically clear that the former have important consequences for the latter. Individuals’ preferences and beliefs are not only channeled but shaped by the rules governing decision-making. Though this is a familiar claim for students of electoral laws and constitutional design, it is no less important for new forms of community on the Internet. To date, the literature on the social aspects of the Internet has been one of sweeping claims about the broad social changes (or lack of changes) that the Internet entails. 1 These wide-scale arguments—about whether the Internet is either a libertarian utopia or a space amenable to corporate and government control, is either prone to balkanization or is fertile ground for new forms of collaboration, is either generative of new ideas or is teetering on a knife-edge between lockdown and anarchy—have made important contributions. Yet because they make only very general claims, they lack comparative bite; in other words, they all have difficulty capturing the important variation in forms of social organization on the Internet, which are very far indeed from exemplifying a simple coherent logic. In this essay, we argue that we should try to capture variation by paying more attention to the decision rules governing choice within collectivities on the Internet. As best we know, all of the sociologically ‘‘interesting’’ collective endeavors on the Internet are characterized by rules or norms; that is, blogs, online discussion groups, and other such forums of communication may appear chaotic and anarchic, but are characterized by informal rules that shape conversation.