The word that strikes my nerve recently is legitimacy. The first time this kind of thing happened to me was when I read Althaus writing that representation is to present again. Legitimacy and representation are two great examples of concepts that we think we know what they mean but when pressing for accurate definitions, they evade into the light of eternity.
From a normative perspective, the legitimacy of a political system is defined as the consistency with the ideal model. If you are a supporter of deliberative democracy, legitimacy means the political system conforms to the principles of deliberative democracy, i.e., it should be open, fair and reason-centered. However, when we ask the question why we should want deliberative democracy, one of the reasons the theorists offered is that it grants legitimacy to the decisions generated by such a system. Here, legitimacy becomes an empirical concept, which can be measured and may vary in degree. From an empirical perspective, legitimacy is defined as an observable object that varies in degree. How to measure it often determines the way it is defined. If it is measured through self-reports of individuals, such as agreeing to be ruled, legitimacy is a perception of the rightness (worthiness in Habermasian term) of the political system. Then it does not distinguish between the different ideals individuals hold about the political system, whether the system should be a deliberative one or not. If it is measured by the performance of the political system, such as economic growth and national security, legitimacy is defined as consequences or effects. Many governments such as the ones in China and Singapore take advantage of this utilitarian approach to justify their ruling. The two ways of measurement are definitely intervened with each other. If the government can successfully persuade the ruled that legitimacy should build upon the effectiveness of governance, then we expect to see the perception of the rightness becomes a covariate of the performance of the political system. What become really interesting, then, are the sources of the perceived legitimacy.
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This afternoon, sitting on the small deck of Gecko, surrounded by the warm and humid air, hidden in the mild noise, I got myself ready for the long-delayed conversation. Three law professors, Lawrence Lessig, Cass Sunstein, and Yochai Benkler, are together to talk about blogs...through their writings. :)
Here is my record of this conversation. Lessig is L, Sunstein is S, Benkler is B and me is me. S: Blogs are an unlikely venue for Habermasian public sphere because of fragmentation and polarization. L: Whether blogs democratize should be examined within the constraint of their codes / architecture. S: Alright. The codes for blogs are like-minded groups that are isolated from each other. B: No. It is not true. The architecture of blogs is the power law distribution in general and the long tail distribution within like-minded groups. Me: What is the power law distribution? B: You guys should read Science and Nature. It means that most people still visit a few superstar websites. So fragmentation is not a problem. Me: Even though people go to the same websites such as google.com, they could selectively choose information that echo their opinions. At the level of individual exposure, it is still fragmented. S: I agree. Me: But selective exposure itself has to be examined rather than being assumed. The first step of assuming preference for the like-mind might be wrong. B: I agree. You have to provide empirical data. Me: How does the long tail distribution help to prevent polarization? B: It means no superstars can totally dominate a small world. Many low end sites are still connected to each other if you look at a smaller scale cluster. Me: OK. So it prevents domination or centralization in small clusters. But how does it prevent fragmentation and polarization? B: Well, it is actually that there is no fragmentation so there is no polarization. L: The distributions you talked about could be changed, do you know? The codes that determine the dynamics are open to changes. B: Oh yes. That is why we should pay close attention to how policy regulates the codes. L: Yes, the constraints of law take advantage of codes to make cyberspace more regulatable. The government can interfere with the formation of the two distributions you mentioned. B: But so far the government has a harder time to control cyberspace than mass media. L: Are you sure? The government enjoys controls that they cannot have before. For example, it can even censor private communication. Me: Probably we should not only use mass media as the benchmark. Other communication modes such as interpersonal comm. should be used as reference point, too. I am totally excited by this upcoming project that NUS is organizing. During the brainstorm meeting, I threw my brain into the storm and proposed a migrant worker study that tries to apply ICTs into supporting the long-distance relationship between the workers and their rural families. The more I think about it, the more I feel that my current research paradigm is challenged.
1. The inter-disciplinary nature of this project: Previously my experience of multiple disciplines is limited to my own exposure to theories and research from different disciplines. But the purpose of the studies is the same -- to answer a question or to test a hypothesis. This project includes people from the computing school, the design school, and the social sciences. The purpose of this project is not just about research. It puts more emphasis on applications. 2. The problem-solving orientation of this project: I have never done a research that really solves a problem or implements a solution. The factors I will consider are quite different here. I become less concerned about the cleanness of my design (e.g., internal validity) than the success of solutions. Dr. Hornick (Annenberg, UPenn) once said that the most sucessful campaign might be the most messy campaign that mobilizes all possilbe social forces. 3. Poor people still have social needs: Probably becasue of my acceptance of Maslow's hierachy of needs, I did not realize that I put physiological needs ahead of any other needs and assumed that without satisfying the physicological needs, no other needs should be considered. This is not true. Social needs such as love and belonging do not come after physicological needs . They exist along with the physiological needs. Therefore, we should use technolgoy to address these needs. A final note: there is no useless reading. I do not know why I started reading books about Chinese rural communities during summer. I simply felt interested. Now the project comes. Now I see the value of reading all items from Baidu news search with the key word "peasants" for three months. My co-author, Dalei Jie, and I recently finished our report on Political Elites, New Media and Youth: A Comparative Study of China vs. Taiwan, funded by UPenn GAPSA-Provost Interdisciplinary Research Award 2008. When we wrote the presentation slides together, Dalei added a final sentence that shocked me first. Later on I realized that it is exactly what I wanted to but did not dare to say.
"What is bad for democracy might not be bad for the cross-strait relationship." The story goes like this: We found that youth from both China and Taiwan have mixed feeling about the cross-strait relationship. Chinese young people have strong sense of nationalism but feel unsatisfied by the political situations in both areas. They tend to be confused and opt for practical goals such as making money. Taiwan young people grew up with a clear local identification but do not completely deny the fact of being Chinese. They tend to dis-trust their political leaders and also, opt for practical goals such as living a happy life. But the symptoms of these mentalities are indifference to politics and lack of activeness in advocating a solution. Political apathy is considered as bad for democracy. However, it functions as a factor that stabilizes the cross-strait relationship in this case. Here is an example of civic participation as a norm. The Civic Potential of Video Games The logic is: as long as games are promoting civic participation, they are not something evil. I am not saying this logic is anything wrong. Just realize that it might not be applicable in any cases. Two pieces of facts caught my interest these days.
Fact 1: The recently revived Speaker's Corner in Hong Lim Park attracted two protesters on September 1st, its first day when restrictions were officially eased. Media reported that there were more audience than actors. Fact 2: Advisory Council on the Impact of New Media on Society released a consultation paper on August 29th, urging the Government to interact with Singaporeans via new media. When I watched news on Fact 1, I cannot stop thinking of Fact 2 and say, come on, because we have the Internet. Our speaker's corner nowadays is the cyberspace. Here is a commentary on the consultation paper. TODAYonline:Can Radical Also Be Right? In other words, if the Government wants to engage citizens in the new media as the report envisions, it cannot always set the agenda. This is quite radical, given that the Government’s prerogative to set the agenda has remained one of the fundamentals in Singapore since independence. The quote above is very interesting because it triggers my mental link between e-engagement and radical democracy. Radical democracy, according to Cohen & Fung, embraces two ideas: Participation and Deliberation. The news author is right to say e-engagement is radical because he realizes that e-engagement gives citizens direct roles in policy-making. The officials will have to respond to citizens' concerns rather than setting the agenda for them. However, the author more or less used radical as a negative word considering that he doubted the co-existence of radical and right. Cohen & Fung's definition implies that radical democracy definitely can be right because it is based on deliberation. So I think the real concern here is not whether e-engagement is radical or not. It is the problem of the tension between participation and deliberation. How does a public decision-making procedure become widely participatory and highly deliberate at the same time? Especially when the Government disagrees with its citizens on what is considered as deliberate. And when the citizens disagree with each other. Communication for Social Change -- American
Communication for Social Stability Non-communication for Social Change Non-communication for Social Stability -- Chinese This does sound like a trick with language. But I think they actually reflect some differences between two sets of values about communication (You can say that they are, in a highly simplified way, the American and the Chinese values). While social change is considered as a goal that is worth fighting for in the US, Chinese prefer social stability, aka, no big changes in the social hierarchy. In order to achieve that stability, sometimes blocking communication becomes necessary. Keeping it to yourself becomes a virtue because speaking out may make the conflicts look heated and even trigger violent reactions. Take it, bear it, and live along with it. Then we'll have our stability. However, not speaking out does not equal no difference/disagreement. Instead, the differences or disagreements take a private format, exist silently in the corners of people's mind, and are actually very vulnerable to manipulation. Due to the lack of communication, every individual's perception of the general public and its will is skewed or biased. This situation, believe it or not, may be friendly to social change. Imagine that a rumor successfully makes everybody think that the majority is for one action. People go out and support the action because they think everyone else is doing it. This situation may be named as "spiral of action". My late-afternoon practice of reasoning... China Hosts Majority of Badware Sites | Berkman Center
When I see this graph, I cannot help thinking that how today's world is different from the one in the cold war era, from the dichotomy of right and wrong, from the infamous single dimension. We have seen projects after projects aiming at making judgement about this world rather than making sense of it. I have no particular opinions regarding Berkman center and its badware project. I am not trying to evaluate the truthfulness of their findings, either. To me, this report is a great illustration of what many prestigious ivory towers and self-claimed independent NGOs try to build -- a judgement system that embraces certain values. No matter what the certain values are, a judgement project always presumes what the best / worst practice is. I am wondering what if a research center in China starts a project like this and how it will render its judgement. Projects like this remind me of John Gray's The Two Faces of Liberalism. Gray said: If liberalism has a future, it is in giving up the search for a rational consensus on the best way of life. Can we give up the search for a rational consensus on the best way of doing the Internet? Nanjing, a medium-size city besides the Yangzi River, recently opened up an online public forum to elicit inputs from citizens on the city's development. This kind of "government-initiated consultation" is nothing new.
When I was an intern reporter for the city newspaper in 1999, I was invited to audit in a public hearing about the raise of taxi fares. We had a representative of taxi drivers, a representative of citizens, a representative of taxi companies and several government officials. The discussion was heated but very polite. The citizen representative listed many concerns to object the raise. The driver had his own arguments. The officials were always referred to with respect and they acted more like a judge rather than a participant whose interest is affected by the discussion. Another instance also happened during my intern. I was notified that a secret meeting would be held between two local real estate companies which had serious business conflicts. The two companies were the largest in the local market and their conflicts threw significant threats to the city's renovation plan. Governmental officials were present again as a judge to settle the thing. This secret meeting was more confrontal than the previous one. I was forced out when they found out that I am a reporter. The results of the two consultations are quite different. I wrote a story about the taxi fare meeting and soon, the policy was made public: Taxi fares were raised but at a lower rate than the one proposed by drivers and taxi companies. I was not able to write anything about the second meeting because I did not know what they settled on. But in both cases, the city government functioned as a mediator between different parties in the civil society. The mediation in the first case lends legitimacy to the policy-making by showing that the procedure, at lest, looks fair. The second case was not open to the public probably because there was not a policy change that the government has to defend in front of the citizens. The two cases fit nicely to the concept of Authoritarian Deliberation proposed by Min Jiang from UNC-Charlotte. In her presentation for the 6th Chinese Internet Research Conference, she made an excellent point that deliberation does not have to exist under a premise of liberal democracy. Instead, an authoritarian country like China has already incorporated the deliberation mechanism into their governance. But what is new in the current case is that the public forum is hosted in a private website which has no official affiliation with the city hall. The call for advices is directed to a large group of citizens rather than a few representatives. The responses are directly from individual citizens rather than being re-presented by some of them. However, the officials still have the final say. As one of the respondents said, 这种听取人们意见的方式很好,希望能够有始有终,确实落实实际操作中。 This way of listening to advices is great. But I hope there will be a good end of it. The advices can be put into effect in operation. |
Weiyu Zhang
I am an Associate Professor at Department of Communication and New Media, National University of Singapore. Categories
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