Social Movements in E-democracy: Civic Networks in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore
Open Access
- Author:
- Jang, Chiau-wen
- Graduate Program:
- Educational Theory and Policy
- Degree:
- Master of Arts
- Document Type:
- Master Thesis
- Date of Defense:
- July 01, 2015
- Committee Members:
- Dana Lynn Mitra, Thesis Advisor/Co-Advisor
- Keywords:
- social movement
social network analysis
civic education - Abstract:
- The social movements shed light on dynamic practice of civic education to encourage students to be an actor in political arena, and transform the sense of conventional civic education into criticism-oriented one. The series of uprisings, the Occupy movements and demonstrations sprang up across North America, and the Arab World in the last couple of years. In Asia, there are three salient social movements launched by young generation in 2014, including the Umbrella Revolution in Hong Kong, the Sunflower Movement in Taiwan, and the Return Our CPF Protest in Singapore. Young generation finds alternatives to challenge traditional norms by disobeying governmental decisions to express the demand of social reform. These series of social movements can be identified as the wave of E-Democracy that social media not only broaden people’s political space and produce participation in public affairs, but also bring innovative tactics to different forms of regimes. Compared to authoritarian regimes, the social movements in three quasi-democratic regimes of Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore have broader public space for citizens to engage in public affairs. However, the rooted culture of Confucian meritocracy and filial piety potentially makes these three Asian states depart from liberal democracy. This study applied social network analysis to Twitter and Facebook data to take centrality, subgroup, and hierarchy analyses as a whole to explore the pattern of civic network in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore. The findings show that civic networks in Hong Kong and Taiwan have similar traits that there is a group of actors with high centrality and multiplex clusters with dense interconnection within networks. Relatively, only few actors in Singapore can play a bridging role that activists or protesters are a small group of like-minded citizens who are affiliated to homogenous clusters. Civic networks in Hong Kong and Taiwan are toward horizontal linkages across different bonding of citizens, while civic network in Singapore is more likely to be hierarchical structure that symbolizes power control and network cohesiveness. The hierarchical network is exclusive of diverse clusters and may be incapable of adapting to unexpected disruption or exogenous pressure. However, the analyses also indicate that three civic networks are still affiliated to relatively homogenous clusters instead of truly diverse clustering. As these three states are all identified as quasi-democratic regimes, governments potentially discourage citizens from any kind of opposition and people are more sensitive to social movement. This context may explain how rooted Chinese culture potentially makes three networks toward hierarchical structure at large, even though the result indicates that Singapore network is the most hierarchical one. In addition, these quasi-democratic regimes may not fulfill students’ capacities for civic commitments, but lead to significant gaps between curriculum and practice. As students were major populations involving in these social movements, current civic education needs to be reformed in the wave of E-Democracy. Compared to conventional civic education emphasizing more on voting, charity or volunteerism, criticism-oriented civic education is needed to encourage students to find the causes of social problems and to involve in social movements. A colorful array for raising effectiveness of civic education should be an important field to provide students practical civic experiences to scaffold the sense of critical thinking and inquiry. The patterns of civic network not only bring insight into the complex interplay between quasi-democratic regimes and social movements, but also bring implication to the reform of civic education in the wave of E-Democracy.