This leads me to approach the question from a very different perspective. I have followed discussions of democracy in China for longer than there has been an “internet”, and thus, approach the question informed by a long history of academic work on political reform, which argues that “democratization” is primarily about creating social conditions and cultural expectations, and rejects the technological determinism inherent in much discourse about democratization, such as the famously influential Rand Corporation study (Kedzie, 1997). China continues to pose interesting challenges to assumptions of the transformative power of the internet, as the nation has fully committed itself to a digital future, but has largely been successful in either blocking access to what the political leaders consider dangerous websites, and even more spectacularly successful in creating conditions in which nobody has any great desire to access those same sites.

Singapore, likewise, presents a set of interesting questions. The nation is one of the world’s most fully wired, and has a full slate of democratic mechanisms and a nominally regulated internet, but with little real political competition and a strong authoritarian bent, something the populace seems quite content with, given the most recent general elections. The recent SARS crisis has even helped to galvanize local public opinion that the current government’s authoritarianism works to the nation’s advantage, as it allowed the medical crisis to be brought under control very quickly, something which Vietnam also discovered. My recent study in this context found that the Internet reinforces the already overwhelming power of the ruling party, and provides almost no benefit to opposition parties.

At the opposite extreme is South Korea, where an already free-wheeling politically competitive environment has been enriched by the Internet. The outcome of the December 2002 Presidential election has attributed by some analysts as having to do primarily with the Internet based campaign of the underdog challenger, thus presenting a positive role for the Internet in democratization, in attracting newer and younger voters. On the other hand, an open and free Internet carries certain inherent political risks. For example, Malaysia’s hands off policy towards the Internet has a number of liberals throughout the region concerned, as the net is being most effectively deployed by the party which is most repressive in its politics.

This makes much of the work done on democratization emerging from the fully-developed democracies of the West quite removed from thinking about democracy within Asia. Within most Western nations, there is a long-inculcated understanding of what democracy is, or at least ought to be. Asian governments, especially democratic ones, are beset by a number of major problems, that are often overlooked in the West, such as high levels of illiteracy, insurmountable urban/rural divides, intrusive media and political regulation, traditions of elite driven politics, and fears of radical political movements using technology to usurp and other elements of political culture. Moreover, with the exception of just a handful of nations, there is no great conviction that democracy is inherently superior to other modes of governance. This is illustrated by the fact that I have been unsuccessfully attempting to publish an article in International Relations journals for almost two years now arguing that if the Internet has a democratizing influence, we had best quit trumpeting that fact, as it only makes those authoritarian governments find ways to prevent that process from happening.

Although the list of systemic and cultural distinctions to be drawn between Western nations and Asia is formidable, it is more complicated than that. Within Asia, the differences between nations, regions, and localities, can be even more dramatic. The bureaucratic officialdom which still predominates in China is conceptually and experientially quite a different thing from the charismatic traditions of leadership in Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines (Pye, 1985). The religious traditions of Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, and to a certain extent, Marxism, have influenced different Asian nations in very different ways, leading to very different understandings of the nature of governance, the role of the government, and the rights and duties of citizens (Ho, Kluver, and Yang, forthcoming).

The reason that I think this is important is that usually, academic analysis of whether the internet is having a democratizing impact focuses upon whether one element of that is being strengthened or weakened. For example, a number of scholars, including Applbaum (1999), Barber (2000/2001), Dahlberg (2001) and Wilhelm (1999) discuss the nature of “deliberation” in the online environment as a key indicator of democratization. But, underlying all of this analysis is a basic consensus forged in the West since Magna Carta, but largely foreign to most Asians.

As another example of how these different assumptions lead to different conclusions, take the example of corporate versus public ownership of media outlets such as ISPs. Much criticism of the democratization thesis arises from political economists, who question the ability of corporate owners of the media to contribute to a fully democratic discourse, whereas in Asia, the privatization of media is referred to as “liberalization,” and there is a much higher suspicion of “public” media. This is especially true when it comes to the regulation of Internet Service Providers. In other words, consumerism and privatization are often seen as a reliable short cut to democratization.

There are three major disciplines (Political Science, International Relations, and Communication) in which the democratizing impact of the Internet has been studied, and it is evident that disciplinary boundaries figure prominently in the types of research questions that emerge, and the consequent conclusions. Within the field of international studies, for example, some interesting research has been done that considers a truly global perspective on this question, whereas within the field of communication, there is little analysis of how the internet affects the political environment outside of the West. But international relations analysts are often poorly prepared to conduct actual empirical research, and thus tend to overstate their arguments. Communication scholars, however, tend to bring great technical and methodological sophistication to their analysis, but consider democracy at the smallest of scales, and set up indicators of democracy that are inadequate at best. Political scientists tend to have a better sense of the problems in conceptualizing democracy, but are often unable to extract the “media” from the larger social environment.

Thus, I would like to present two critical issues that I think must be considered in our understanding of the political impact of the Internet. The first is that of political culture, which I define as the symbolic environment in which politics happens. This includes the assumptions, expectations, mythologies, and mechanisms of politics, including philosophical and religious grounding for political practice. Lucien Pye (1985) argues that modern scholarship have wrongly assumed that power relationships exist similarly across cultures. “In different times and places people have thought of power in very different ways…of all social phenomena power is one of the most sensitive to cultural nuances; its potentialities and its limitations are always constrained by time and place” (p. viii). If the distribution and deployment of power differ from place to place, so do the ways in which technologies are used to seek, maintain, and use power. Theorizing about the impact of the internet on political practice, then, must take into account the host of issues that comprise political culture.

It would certainly be possible to theorize from a more narrow perspective, in other words, in not attempting to universalize the relationship between the Internet and democracy. However, to do so risks making our research irrelevant to a developing world, much of which is looking to technology to bring it in to the modern world. Moreover, it makes our conclusions so narrowly construed that they can be of little theoretical value at all.

A second issue that must be brought to the forefront of our theory is that of mechanism. From a theoretical and philosophical perspective, there seems to be no consensus on the mechanism, or process, linking “technology” to democracy. Although Kedzie (1997) posited a clear and potentially viable mechanism for the role of information technology in achieving democratization (which was actually undermined by serious methodological problems), few communication scholars have taken such a risk. Rather, the theories tend to be nominal or definitional in their orientation; in other words, we isolate a particular characteristic of the internet, such as “distributed,” “egalitarian”, or “participatory,” and thereby define it as inherently democratizing. Because there is a weak identification of mechanism, the testing of the theories becomes pragmatically impossible.

In reviewing a significant number of studies, I have identified four primary mechanism that have been identified. I don’t say that this is exhaustive, but it does seem to reflect the dominant themes. The first and perhaps most important argument I will refer to as the inherent characteristics argument, which states that the very technological characteristics of the Internet impose upon society a certain form of social organization and values, and thus, will ultimately impact political consciousness. The technological features of decentralization, flattened hierarchies, and distributed networks will necessarily undermine authority, hierarchy, and control, all values of previous technologies. This is the logic behind the already mentioned Rand study, which identified “reciprocity” as the key characteristic (Kedzie, 1997), but another version is that the Internet provides a sense of control and self determination.

A second line of argument, much more prominent among international relations theorists, is the integration argument, that trade and economic engagement, exemplified by the Internet and other media exposes citizens to a larger world, thus encouraging democratic discourse. This argument has not been adequately addressed in communication literature, it seems.

A third argument is what I will call the “free flow of information” position, which argues that the overwhelming amount of information unleashed by the Internet undermines state or corporate control of information, and will thus ultimately strengthen pro-democracy impulses. Ultimately, the widespread diffusion of information technologies enables mobilization of democratic forces. Dissident groups, ethnic and religious minorities, and civic groups who have long been under the control of the state, finally have a means of publication, organization, and mobilization that will ultimately enable them to gain the offline strength to challenge the dominance of the central party. Journalist Scott Shane, drawing upon the experiences of Iran, the Philippines, and the USSR, argues that “from such events it is possible to build a case for a kind of future information utopia, a borderless world in which semiconductors empower the masses and check authoritarian power (p. 279). Although Shane recognizes the diverse cultural and historical factors that led to the implosion of the USSR, the subtitle of his book still illustrates his convictions: “how information ended the Soviet Union.”

Finally, the last argument is the civil society/public sphere argument, which draws heavily upon Habermas’ understanding of the “public sphere” as a place where citizens can exchange views on matters of importance to the common good, so that public opinion can be formed (Jakubowicz, 1994). The logic of this argument is that the Internet, to an extent not previously possible, enables a new public sphere to emerge via technology, unmediated by state control. The ultimate impact of this is that community, local or national issues can be addressed via technology, and minor or marginalized political actors can achieve greater organizational strength. Although it was much maligned, Ross Perot’s vision of the “electronic town hall” was a version of this argument.

Each of these models suffers from its own conceptual and methodological problems, which I haven’t attempted to address here. I have proposed so far that in order to more accurately theorize about the democratic potential of the net, we draw both wider cultural parameters to the project and that we clarify the conceptual scheme by which we see the process happening. The difference is critical in our understanding, as it is the difference between saying the Internet creates new political realities, or just modifies realities that are already there. If our predictive models only apply to a small number of nations and political experiences, then there is little point in justifying the hardware expenses associated with the information society, especially to developing nations who have more pressing budgetary considerations.