The blog, Mike Norman Economics points to a recent paper from Cornell which can be downloaded from this link. It is a study of democratic internet sites called Wikis where people can collaboratively and democratically contribute and improve content. It finds that as the number of contributors grows past some arbitrarily large number, a "oligopoly" (a hierarchy of power roles) is instituted. From this, conclusions are drawn (rightly or wrongly) about the limits of the size of democratic organizations.
There is much folk-wisdom on this topic. In general, people seem to agree that truly participatory democracy has size limits. We hear of Valve, a Silicon Valley technology start-up being participatory and flat at over 300 team members and wonder. A detailed reading of this work may help shed some light and, hopefully, we will see this line of inquiry continued as it has deeper value for understanding governance in the broader context.
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