Can Information Technology Save Democracy in a Small Town?

How open data and simple digital tools could revive citizen power in Claremont and other small towns?

Introduction

Local government in Sullivan County, the Claremont City Council, and the Claremont School Board do not fail for lack of meetings, motions, or minutes. It fails, when it fails, because a small number of organized actors control information, agendas, and continuity, while the broader public is left with fragments: a livestream here, a PDF there, a rumor on Facebook. Information technology (IT) can narrow that gap, but only if it is designed with a sober understanding of how power actually works.

Pareto, Mosca, Michels, and Searle offer that realism. They describe why a minority will always dominate, why organizations drift toward oligarchy, and why ordinary citizens struggle to form and express a genuine shared will. The question is not how to abolish these structural dynamics, but how to use IT to discipline and counterbalance them, making local power more transparent, contestable, and accountable.

Theoretical Analysis of Local Governance Challenges

Pareto: Circulation of Elites and the 80/20 principle

Vilfredo Pareto argues that in every society, roughly 20% of actors drive 80% of outcomes. Power is concentrated in an elite that eventually decays and is replaced by a new elite, not by “the people” as a whole. Applied to Sullivan County government, Claremont City Council, and the Claremont School Board, this means:

• A small set of elected officials, senior staff, union leaders, major contractors, and perennial activists dominate decisions and narratives.

• “Change” usually means rotation within that elite, new names, same game, rather than a genuine realignment of power with citizens.

The challenge: most citizens become spectators rather than principals. Consent is tacit and default, not actively granted.

Mosca: The ruling class as an organized minority

Gaetano Mosca sharpens the point: the ruling class is powerful because it is organized, coordinated, and institutionally embedded, while the majority is disorganized and fragmented. In local terms:

• County officials, city administrators, and school district staff share norms, relationships, and workflows that persist across elections.

• Citizens face complexity, jargon, and time costs that make coordination rare and brittle.

The result is a durable “inside game.” Even when citizens disagree, their objections are scattered in time and space: a Facebook rant here, a three-minute public comment there. Mosca’s ruling class wins not because it is evil, but because it is continuous and coordinated.

Michels: The Iron Law of Oligarchy

Robert Michels observes that all large organizations, even those founded on democratic ideals, tend toward oligarchy. The mechanics are simple:

• Expertise: those who know the rules, budgets, and procedures gain influence.

• Control of agenda and information: leadership decides what is discussed, what is buried in the consent calendar, and what never makes it onto an agenda.

• Time: ordinary people cannot live at the meeting table.

In Sullivan County, Claremont City Hall, and the School Board, this means that formal democracy (elections, open meetings) coexists with operational oligarchy: staff reports, committee work, and negotiations that occur out of public view and are effectively irreversible by the time they hit the agenda.

Searle: Collective intentionality and the problem of shared will

John Searle’s idea of collective intentionality, “we intend” as opposed to “I intend”, points to another difficulty. For citizens to genuinely grant or withhold consent, they need:

• Shared understanding of facts (budgets, trade-offs, legal constraints).

• Shared framing of problems and options.

• Channels to articulate a common position (“we, as Claremont citizens, want X”).

Instead, different groups inhabit distinct information ecosystems: some follow meeting videos, others read local news, and many follow neither. Collective intentionality in Claremont or Sullivan County rarely emerges; at best, minor factions manage a facsimile of it.

Obstacles to Consent and Collective Intentionality

These theories highlight several concrete obstacles for citizens:

• Information asymmetry: Staff and long-time insiders have detailed, continuous knowledge. Citizens see episodic snapshots, a budget hearing, a controversial vote, without context.

• Agenda control: What goes on the agenda, when it appears, and how it is framed are mostly elite decisions. Citizens react to pre-packaged options instead of shaping the menu.

• Coordination costs: It is hard for citizens to find each other, compare notes, and converge on shared priorities across county, city, and school domains.

• Fragmented feedback channels: A citizen emails one councilor, leaves a voicemail for a county office, and speaks at one School Board meeting. None of that aggregates into visible, collective “we think this” signals.

• Temporal mismatch: Power operates continuously; citizen input is episodic and ritualized. Elections every year or two or three do not fix decisions made every week.

If citizens cannot easily see what is happening, find one another, and project a coherent, shared stance, then “consent of the governed” becomes a polite fiction. The task for IT is to reduce these coordination and information costs sharply enough to matter.

IT-Based Solutions and Reasoned Application

Technology will not abolish elites or oligarchy. The goal is to make elites more legible, contestable, and responsive by giving citizens better tools for understanding, coordination, and pressure.

1. Unified Transparency Portals (County, City, School)
   Instead of separate, confusing websites, build a single public-facing transparency layer (even if it federates multiple backends):

• All agendas, minutes, budgets, contracts, and policies are in searchable, machine-readable form.

• Automatic transcription and indexing of meetings (video + text), with topic tags and keyword search (e.g., “special education,” “property tax,” “opioid funding”).

• Version history for key documents (budgets, ordinances, policies) so citizens can see who changed what, when.

This attacks information asymmetry directly. It does not eliminate Pareto’s 20%, but it makes their actions visible, traceable, and analyzable.

2. Issue-based Civic Dashboards

Create dashboards that track a few high-salience metrics across all three bodies:

• Property tax rates, per-pupil spending, debt levels, and significant capital projects.

• Outcome indicators: graduation rates, overdose incidents, crime trends, and infrastructure maintenance cycles.

Visualizing these metrics, with links back to votes and decisions, turns scattered PDFs into a coherent story. It supports Searle’s collective intentionality by giving citizens a shared factual baseline.

3. Structured Public Input Platforms
   
   

Replace the current chaos of email + Facebook + three-minute comments with a structured platform:

• Citizens submit comments tied to specific agenda items, proposals, or issues.

• Comments are tagged, summarized, and visible to everyone, not just officials or those watching live or rebroadcast TV sessions.

• Simple sentiment and topic analysis show patterns: “80 comments on the new school contract; 70% opposed the current terms.”

This transforms Mosca’s “unorganized majority” into a partially organized one. It does not turn citizens into a permanent ruling class, but it makes their preferences visible, quantifiable, and harder to ignore.

4. Crowdsourced Agenda-Setting

Introduce a formal mechanism by which citizens can propose items for consideration:

• A digital petition tool where issues that reach a threshold (e.g., 100 verified local signatures) must be placed on the agenda of the relevant body (County, City, School Board) for discussion and response.

• Integration with the input platform so citizens can see which issues are trending and add their support.

This partially breaks oligarchic agenda control. Elites still decide outcomes, but they lose monopoly over what is discussable.

5. Participatory Budgeting Pilots

At the city and school district level, allocate a small, discrete portion of spending (even 1–2%) to participatory processes:

• Citizens submit project proposals (e.g., playground upgrades, crosswalks, small program grants).

• Proposals are costed by staff, then citizens vote online and in person.

Scaling this county-wide may be harder initially, but targeted pilots demonstrate that “we decided this” can mean something concrete. This is a direct exercise in collective intentionality: citizens move from commentary to allocation.

6. Civic Identity and Reputation Systems

To avoid pure “astroturf” dynamics, use simple identity verification and lightweight reputation:

• Verified local accounts (via address or voter registration) have priority in certain processes (agenda petitions, participatory budgeting).

• Contributors who consistently provide constructive, accurate input could gain informal status (e.g., “trusted contributor” badges).

This does not create a new ruling class, but it acknowledges that some citizens will become “super-participants” and channels that tendency into transparent, beneficial roles rather than backroom influence.

7. Cross-Jurisdictional Notification and Education

Most people do not know which body is responsible for which problem. Build:

• A unified “What’s Changing This Month” feed that surfaces key decisions and hearings across County, City, and School Board, with plain-language summaries and links to deeper detail.

• Topic subscriptions (“schools,” “public safety,” “taxes”) so citizens see the whole policy landscape, not just one silo.

This reduces fragmentation and helps citizens form issue-based coalitions that cut across institutions.

Conclusion: Synthesis and Anticipated Impact

Pareto, Mosca, Michels, and Searle are not comforting. They tell us that power will concentrate, that organized minorities will rule, that organizations drift toward oligarchy, and that genuine collective will is hard to form. Sullivan County, the Claremont City Council, and the Claremont School Board are not exceptions; they are textbook cases.

The point of IT is not to replace politics with apps. The point is to attack the specific failure modes that these theories highlight:

• Against Pareto’s elite opacity, transparency portals and dashboards expose the actions and outcomes of the few to the many.

• Against Mosca’s unorganized majority, structured input platforms and agenda-setting tools help citizens coordinate and present themselves as a visible, organized force.

• Against Michels’ agenda and information control, participatory budgeting and petition-triggered agenda items create pockets where citizen will directly constrains elite discretion.

• In service of Searle’s collective intentionality, shared data, issue dashboards, and unified communication channels give citizens the raw material to say “we intend,” not just “I complain.”

None of this eliminates elites or the iron law of oligarchy. What it does is tighten the leash: make power more observable, more accountable, and more dependent on an informed, semi-organized public. If Sullivan County and Claremont adopt IT systems built with these hard facts in mind, citizens gain something that currently exists mostly on paper: a realistic ability to understand what is being done in their name, to coordinate around shared priorities, and to grant or withhold consent in ways that actually bite.

But, in the absence of the will to make democracy work, no amount of technology will move the needle towards freedom.