Jonathan Zittrain's hierarchy/polyarchy, top-down/bottom-up taxonomy

I'm editing the openDemocracy front page this week, and alongside the regular articles I've featured a video from contributor Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of Internet law at Harvard Law School who was until recently also a professor here at Oxford. It's a presentation on 'The Historical Record in the Digital Age' in which he discusses the effect of the web on the preservation of information for future generations, and the politics thereof:

Zittrain offers an interesting, 'McKinsey-esque' framework which he uses to categorise different ways in which information can flow. It's a framework he's employed to categorise many different areas in previous lectures, and you can see it by clicking the play button and waiting twenty seconds. But if that's too long for you, here's a quick description of the two axes it employs, a left-right axis covering the spectrum from 'hierarchy' to 'polyarchy', and a top-bottom axis covering to spectrum from 'top-down' to 'bottom-up' systems:

By hierarchy, he means a system whose subjects "don't have a lot of choice ... they exist within the system and that's it"; by contract, in polyarchy as he understands it "there is choice ... and the more choice there is, the more you go to the right" on the spectrum. By a bottom-up system, he means one in which "those empowered to shape the system, to make its rules and enforce them, are in identity with the people of the system"; as this identity breaks down, systems become more and more top-down according to this categorisation.

Early on in the talk Zittrain applies this taxonomy to political philosophies, with interesting results I may discuss later...