How Knowledge Workers Vote

The line dividing Democrats and Republicans on the issues of liberty and community is drawn most clearly on the question of school choice. Conservative Republicans, particularly those who are evangelical Christians, argue that parents should have the right to choose where their children are educated and support a voucher system that could be used to send kids to public or private schools. Liberal Democrats and their supporters in the teachers' unions claim a voucher system would destroy the public schools and the common values they teach.

Knowledge workers view this debate as just another example of the false dichotomies of Industrial Age politics. They oppose the bureaucratic monopoly that dominates public education. They want competition and choice -- but they want that competition to take place among schools that teach the values of citizenship. They favor publicly chartered schools because this new approach introduces competition without threatening the common values of the community.

3. Do more and do it with less. The underlying premise of Industrial Age politics -- the one thing that both Democrats and Republicans have always agreed on is that the more government does, the more it costs. Knowledge workers simply do not believe this is true. Their experience with new technology has convinced nearly 62% of them, compared with only 46% of other Californians, that computers and other technology can eliminate government bureaucracy without reducing public services. They've seen it happen in their companies, and they expect to see it in government.

Knowledge workers don't want a government that regulates everything or a government that does nothing to affect the free market. They want an Information Age government that sets the rules within which the market operates so it will achieve desirable results. They would prefer, for example, a system of job retraining in which individuals are free to choose the kind of training they need rather than a system in which government decides what the training will be and where and how it will be given. In other words, they favor a job-training market in which demand is created by government money provided to people who need it, and supply is filled by those who demonstrate that they're best at providing the services people will pay for.

The new constituency of knowledge workers has a consistent and coherent set of beliefs that cuts across the traditional frameworks and formulations the two major political parties offer. Whoever understands this first and gives the new constituency what it wants will not only win the next election, but also become to the Information Age what the New Deal became to the Industrial Age: the dominant political force in America for the next 60 years.

Dudley Buffa is president of the Institute for the New California, based in Lafayette, and co-author with Morley "Winograd of Taking Control: Politics in the Information Age" (Henry Holt & Co., 1996). Michael Hais of Frank N. Magid Associates, based in Los Angeles, conducted the survey for the Institute.