Reconnecting Representatives in Two East
Asian Democracies
Jonathan Sullivan & Sehun Cheon
Received: 5 November 2010 /Accepted: 10 January 2011 /Published online: 12 February 2011
# Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011
Abstract Politicians in democracies the world over have begun enthusiastically
adopting and adapting web-based methods for communicating with voters and
constituents. This article examines one method, i.e. blogging, in the context of
legislators in Taiwan and South Korea, two of the most switched-on democracies in
the world. Comparing these cases to each other and to the western cases that
dominate the literature, the article provides empirical findings on the scale of uptake
and the place of blogging amongst other media. It asks who is blogging, what are
they blogging about and are they promoting interaction with constituents?
Keywords Politicalcommunication . Web2.0 . Blogging . Taiwan . Korea . Legislator
Introduction
As web-based communication tools have become commonplace in everyday life, so
politicians around the world have begun to exploit the opportunities for new forms
of communication with constituents and voters. In the context of research on how
the internet is changing information flows and political power and broader debates
on the implications for democracy and civil society, elected officials’ and election
candidates’ experimentation with new communication tools, especially those
associated with web 2.0 technologies, has generated substantial academic interest
(for a review, see [21]). This article examines one such practice, i.e. blogging, by
representatives in two East Asian democracies, the Republic of China (hereafter
Taiwan) and South Korea (hereafter Korea).1
A weblog, blog for short, is ‘a web
East Asia (2011) 28:21–36
DOI 10.1007/s12140-011-9138-z
1
Throughout the article we use the adjective “Taiwanese” to refer to representatives to the Legislative
Yuan. This usage is purely shorthand and does not imply that legislators from the other islands under the
jurisdiction of the ROC are representatives of the main island Taiwan, or that representatives from Jinmen
and Mazu should be considered Taiwanese. We thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out.
J. Sullivan (*) :S. Cheon
University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK
e-mail: jonlsullivan@gmail.com
page with minimal to no external editing providing online commentary, periodically
updated and presented in reverse chronological order, with hyperlinks to other online
sources’ [9, p. 22]. As such, blogs are often characterized as being flexible,
interactive and informal, with the potential advantages that this holds for
representatives to communicate with citizens. The emergence of blogging as a
mode of communication for representatives has prompted some intriguing claims. In
the United Kingdom for instance, blogging has been described as an opportunity for
politicians ‘to reduce disconnection with the people they represent’ [7, p. 9]. Since
blogging reportedly differs from more traditional top-down, monologic modes of
communication it may thus constitute a ‘means for constituents to engage in a
conversation with [representatives]’ [16, p. 645].
To date, research on political blogging in non-western cases is limited [29, 506].
Published work on blogging has predominantly focused on advanced democracies,
despite the high levels of internet connectivity and usage observed in newer
democracies in East Asia, particularly South Korea and Taiwan. This is a deficit, not
least because the majority of internet scholars have come to emphasize contextspecific
rather than universal effects of internet usage [21]. Phenomena of interest
such as the speed and scale of take-up, patterns of usage and user-level effects are
expected to vary according to pre-existing social, cultural and economic conditions.
We cannot assume that political blogging has developed in the same ways in Taiwan
and Korea as it has in advanced western democracies. Although Taiwan and Korea
represent contexts quite distinct from the western cases that dominate the literature,
citizens in these two democracies are increasingly evincing the feelings of
disconnectedness from their political representatives [35, p. 81; 39] that western
scholars argue blogging has the potential to ameliorate [12, p. 22]. The aim of this
article is to assess and compare the extent to which representatives in Taiwan’s
Legislative Yuan and Korea’s National Assembly have adopted blogging as a means
of communication and to explore how they are using the medium.
Political Blogging
Blogs about politics were established in the United States as early as 1997, with the
Drudge Report achieving notoriety for the medium by breaking the Monica
Lewinsky scandal. As a political communication tool, blogging first achieved
prominence with Howard Dean’s campaign for the Democratic presidential
nomination in 2004 [27]. In contrast to the technologies and usage patterns of
earlier versions of the web (predominantly top-down provision of information) Web
2.0 is characterized by community, networks, participation and sharing. Web 2.0
applications include podcasting, wikis, peer-to-peer file sharing, social media and
blogging [18]. Compared to maintaining a website, blogging has several advantages
that make it an attractive communication tool. Blogs are versatile, easy to maintain
and entry barriers are low. As Rosenbloom puts it, ‘a blogger needs only a computer,
internet access, and an opinion’ [32, p. 31]. Blogs allow users to post commentary
on their interests, to include a variety of multimedia content, to link to other sites and
allow readers to interact via comment and contact functions. They offer a venue for
informal public conversations and a formidably candid focus group. In short, blogs
22 East Asia (2011) 28:21–36
are a ‘useful platform to present experiences, ideas and observations in a
personalized manner’ [11, p. 369]. Given the proliferation of free, user-friendly
blogging software and the flexibility of the medium, it is not surprising that the
blogosphere has expanded rapidly. The blog search engine Technorati counted
around 30 million English language blogs in March 2006. A year later this number
had tripled [31]. From a low-profile niche activity, blogs have become mainstream,
giving rise to a new breed of public intellectual and celebrity in the process. The
most popular ‘A-list blogs’ attract astonishingly large audiences and have increasing
influence on mainstream media [34,38].
In terms of politicians’ adoption of blogging, research interest has primarily been
driven by the potential for blogs to reconnect citizens and representatives. In both
advanced democracies and in Taiwan and Korea, mass level survey responses
consistently indicate that citizens are feeling increasingly alienated from their elected
officials [8,35]. The response of many of officials, driven by self-preservation, is
manifest in ‘a relentless desire to reconnect with the public’ [6, p. 273]. On the one
hand, candidates go on the campaign trail wearing slacks and windcheaters, ride
bicycles in their campaign ads, participate in fun runs and show their compassion by
turning out at disaster sites. On the other, mass and new media strategies have been
adopted that see representatives take part in reality and entertainment shows on TV
and maintain social media accounts. As one element in this process, blogging has
received positive attention from a number of western scholars interested in how
‘political blogs contribute to a cultural perception of a civic conversation’ [7, p. 18].
Indeed, there is preliminary evidence that blogs may have a positive role to play in
‘reframing communication’ and ‘enhancing democratic debate’ [13, p. 21].
However, preliminary research findings in western cases also suggest multiple
obstacles. First, among representatives blogging appears to be a niche activity,
undertaken only by a few politicians, usually those with an interest in
technology. For instance, blogging is far from widespread among Members of
Parliament in the United Kingdom, with just 12 out of 649 reported to be regular
bloggers in 2006 [11]. Second, blogging is an activity that appears, in the majority
of cases, to be ephemerally linked to campaign periods [11,24]. Blogs may have a
positive role alongside more traditional forms of campaign media, but mobilizing
voters is not the way in which most scholars envisage blogs reconnecting citizens
and representatives. Third, the most attractive putative feature of blogs is their
potential facility for promoting dialogue [16, p. 643]. However, it has been
observed that ‘the extent of interactivity in the blogosphere can be easily
overstated’ [7, p. 16]. Other research finds that informing, rather than interaction,
is the ‘core business of blogging’ [26, p. 102] and that it falls halfway between the
information provision characteristic of Web 1.0 and the networked connectivity of
Web 2.0 [18]. Fourth, in the contemporary communications environment, where
users have almost endless choice of media, it is easy for people to avoid exposure
to information that goes against their own preferences. There is a possibility
therefore that blogging is a form of narrowcasting, and legislators are essentially
‘preaching to the choir’. As Jackson observes, blogs can have ‘a very narrow and
specific role to enhance debate within a separate e-constituency’ [17, p. 97]. In
some cases, this has gone beyond an echo-chamber effect to result in extreme
polarization [1,5].
East Asia (2011) 28:21–36 2323
What is the situation in Taiwan and Korea? Is blogging by representatives a niche
activity, or is the take-up more widespread than in western contexts? How does the
scale of blogging compare with other communication tools? Is blogging purely
campaign driven, or does it have greater longevity? Who is blogging in Taiwan and
Korea? What are legislators blogging about and what function are they using their
blogs for? Are legislators’ blogs promoting interactivity with users, or is top-down
information provision the main modus operandi? Is anyone paying attention to these
blogs? Addressing these questions is useful from the perspective of exploring the
political communications environments in Taiwan and Korea, but also allows
comparison with western research.
Background
Two of the most switched-on societies in the world, conditions in Taiwan and Korea
appear, at the outset, favourable for representatives to adopt web-based communications.
Reflecting high-tech economies increasingly reliant on information
technology and consumer electronics, internet penetration and usage rates are
outstandingly high. For instance, according to Taiwan’s National Communications
Commission (NCC) there were 19 million broadband subscriptions in 2009, in a
population of 23 million [28]. Furthermore, the Taiwan Network Information Centre
(TNIC) estimated in 2008 that 70 per cent of eligible voters used the internet [33].
Korea meanwhile boasts the highest rate of fixed and mobile broadband connectivity
in the world [22, p. 2]. Taiwan and Korea are also consistently ranked the two best
performing e-democracies in the world. In Taiwan, progress under the framework of
the Electronic Government Program enacted by the Executive Yuan in April 2001
was especially rapid. By November 2003, ‘all government organizations were
connected online’ and thousands of government agency websites had been created
[10]. This progress established Taiwan as the world’s top-performing e-democracy
in 2002, just ahead of Korea [23, p. 103]. More recently, Korea’s e-government
index-score placed it first (ahead of Taiwan) out of 198 cases [37]. The respective
e-government portals in Taiwan and Korea are cited as examples of global best
practice [37].
Taiwanese and Korean parties and politicians have a history of early adoption of
online communication tools, particularly as part of their election campaign strategies.
In Taiwan for instance, Taipei mayoral candidates were incorporating bulletin board
systems (BBS) into their campaign communications as early as December 1994. By
the time of the presidential campaign in March 2000, candidates were running
sophisticated multimedia content on their websites. As President, in March 2002,
CHEN Shuibian held online discussions with ‘netizens,’ i.e. online citizens [20]. In
addition to their user-friendly and highly informative websites, major parties now
maintain YouTube channels and social media accounts. In Korea, online campaigning
began in earnest with the National Assembly election in April 2000 and is
generally believed to have had a strong influence on the outcome of the December
2002 presidential campaign [22, p. 5]. Characterized as the ‘internet election’ [21],
the 2002 campaign featured a liberal underdog candidate, Roh Moon-hyun, who
aggressively targeted his online campaign at mobilizing reform minded youth. The
24 East Asia (2011) 28:21–36
use of online media allowed the progressive Roh campaign to communicate directly
with voters without the filter of the more conservative mainstream media [4,30].
However, the major cleavages of political competition in Korea have been mapped
on to Korean cyberspace, with competing domains of progressive and conservative
elements, which Chang [5] describes as ‘Cyber-Balkanization’.
In both Taiwan and Korea, adoption of online communication tools can be seen as
a rational response to several factors. Internet penetration and usage rates are high,
leading to widespread familiarity with, and the expectation of, online communications.
This is especially pronounced among young voters; an increasingly important
segment of the electorate in both cases. Since young voters are less likely than older
cohorts to manifest ingrained regionalism or party identification in their vote choice,
they are more likely to base their vote choices on what they experience during a
campaign (as demonstrated by Roh’s successful mobilization effort in 2002). It
would be surprising if legislators taking up blogging were unaware of these factors.
The impression of being informal and embracing dialogue with voters, demonstrating
that they are ‘with it’, and the potential of blogs to influence media agendas and
raise individual profiles are all important, strategic considerations. As Coleman puts
it, ‘politicians’ wish to connect has more to do with adaptive self-preservation than
any desire to hang out with the plebs’ [6, p. 273].
Such instrumental motivations are understandable when it comes to gaining a
potential advantage during a campaign, but what about outside of campaign season?
Are legislators similarly motivated to blog when there are less immediate benefits?
Although prior research on political blogging has focused predominantly on its role
as a campaign tool [19,21], the focus in this article is on the blogging practices of
elected representatives during outside of campaign season. While blogging may help
familiarize voters with a candidate prior to election the potential of blogs to
‘reconnect with citizens’ is arguably more important outside of campaign periods.
This is particularly so in Taiwan, where major reforms prior to the most recent
legislative election in 2008 could signal a further distancing between representatives
and their constituents. Under the previous Single Non-Transferable Vote (SNTV)
system, legislators could be elected with very small support bases [3] and their
campaigns and constituency service were managed accordingly, i.e. on a small, often
personal, scale [25]. However, following redistricting, larger constituencies make it
more difficult for legislators to maintain such close connections with their
constituents.
Scale of Blogging
To locate legislators’ blogs we collected information from the official lists of each
institution and supplemented this using search engines. We began collecting data in
2007 and in the three years since then there has been a substantial turnover of
legislator blogs. The contextual and strategic factors outlined above suggest that
blogging should be an attractive option for Taiwanese and Korean legislators and
this indeed is the case. In Taiwan, 88 of the 126 members (70 per cent) who have
served during the Seventh Legislative Yuan, i.e. the regular cohort elected in January
2008 plus the 13 subsequently elected in bi-elections, have tried their hand at
East Asia (2011) 28:21–36 2525
blogging. In Korea, 141 of 298 sitting legislators (47 per cent) have had a blog. This
discrepancy may indicate differences in preference, with Korean legislators more
likely to use the Korean innovation of ‘minihompy.’ Minihompies are webpages that
act as a hub for a user’s online tools and networks, sometimes incorporating a blog
function, and are increasingly popular among Korean internet users [15, p. 1590]. A
further distinction is that Taiwanese legislators are more likely to try blogging, but
also more likely to let their blogs become ‘ineffective’, by infrequent updating or
abandonment. The scale of blogging in both cases is extraordinarily high compared
with western institutions such as the British parliament, where the proportion of
blogging representatives is between two and ten per cent [11].
The extent to which blogs can be considered current varies. Some blogs are
regularly updated whereas others are not and some have clearly been abandoned. To
distinguish between an ‘effective blog’ and ones that are infrequently updated or
moribund, we calculated the number of blogs that had been updated with fresh
content within one month of our data collection. In Taiwan, the average proportion of
legislators with an effective blog in the data collection period was between 30 and 50
per cent. At the time of writing, 47 of the 113 current sitting legislators (42 per cent)
have an effective blog. For Korea, 118 of 298 (40 per cent) sitting legislators have an
effective blog at time of writing.
Because of the electoral systems in place in Taiwan and Korea, a distinction can
be made between types of legislator based on electoral district. In the 113-member
Legislative Yuan in Taiwan, 73 constituency based party-nominated members are
elected by First Past The Post (FPTP) in single member districts and 34 ‘at-large’
legislators are elected on a parallel ballot from party lists using the largest remainder
method in the nationwide vote. Six further seats are reserved for Taiwanese
aborigines in two ‘lowland’ and ‘upland’ districts. In the 299-member Korean
National Assembly, 245 members are voted in single-member constituencies, with
54 seats allocated by proportional representation.2
This distinction allows us to
compare the behaviour of constituency based legislators with that of at-large
legislators with a nationwide constituency. There is reason to think that legislators
with different constituencies may behave differently in their communication
strategies. For instance, research in the United Kingdom suggests that local
Members of Parliament (MPs) use their blogs to gain publicity and enhance their
media profiles [13, p. 23]. Jackson [17] argues that blogs allow local MPs to
transcend local boundaries to become nationally known figures. The findings for
Korea support this argument, with constituency based legislators proportionally
more likely to have had a blog at one time (48 per cent) than their national
counterparts (34 per cent). The opposite was the case in Taiwan, where national
legislators were more likely to have a blog (68 per cent) than their constituency
counterparts (49 per cent), although these differences are minimal when we consider
only the number of effective blogs (see Table 1 below).
Prior research suggests the absence of a discrete profile of a representative who
blogs [13]. However, identifying distinct profiles is hindered in western cases by the
2
As decreed by the Constitution, the number of seats in the National Assembly is 299. In the 2008
election for the current (18th) session eight seats were left vacant, to be subsequently filled via bi-election
in July 2010.
26 East Asia (2011) 28:21–36
small number of blogging representatives. The larger sample sizes witnessed in
Taiwan and Korea allow more leverage in this regard and demonstrate, as expected,
differences based on age, sex and location. Blogging representatives in Taiwan tend
to be an average of three years younger than their non-blogging counterparts.
Bloggers are also more likely to be based in major metropolitan areas, although the
urban-rural divide has decreased over time as representatives of smaller municipalities
and rural constituencies have started to take up blogging. Proportionally, female
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) legislators with a national constituency are the
most likely to have a blog. In Korea the age effect is more pronounced, where
national constituency bloggers are eight years younger on average than their nonblogging
colleagues. Women representatives in both Taiwan and Korea are
proportionally more likely than their male colleagues to start and maintain a blog.
Finally in this section, we provide an indication of how many people are actually
paying attention to these blogs. Since most blogs provide a unique visit or page-view
counter, we can estimate the extent to which they are being accessed. In Taiwan, of
currently effective blogs, four have attracted hundreds of thousands of visits and 26
are in the tens of thousands. Two blogs exceed 1.5 million page views. In terms of
audience size, XU Zhengxiong’s blog is an extreme outlier, with an average of 303
thousand visits every month since it was launched in 2007. Xu, a sixth term
constituency legislator representing Taizhong County and sitting on the Finance
Committee, developed a specialist blog dedicated to families with credit and debt
problems. This specialist interest is manifest in Xu’s policy advocacy in the
Legislature and his blog has received over nine million visits, giving rise to
numerous online communities and extending far beyond Xu’s constituency. It is a
good example of what Jackson refers to as a ‘parallel e-constituency that exists only
in the blogosphere’ [16, p. 658]. In Korea, one quarter of current blogs count the
number of visits in the hundreds of thousands, with a handful in the millions,
including the constituency based legislator Chung Dong-young. Chung is a former
journalist, long-time high-profile progressive and unsuccessful presidential candidate
in 2007. Naturally, the majority of legislators do not share the same level of public
awareness and notoriety and there is substantial variation in the popularity of blogs
as measured by number of visits. In both Taiwan and Korea some blogs receive a
few thousand visits per month. The national/constituency distinction does not have a
consistent effect on the number of visits. Instead, popularity seems to be based on
Table 1 Current legislators’ use of web-based communication tools (n)
District Number Website Blog Effective blog Social media Microblog
Taiwan National 34 4 23 14 10 9
Constituency 73 22 55 30 25 16
Aborigine 6 2 4 3 0 0
Total 113 28 (25%) 82 (73%) 47 (42%) 35 (31%) 25 (22%)
Korea National 54 54 18 18 1 3
Constituency 244 244 123 100 119 72
Total 298 298 (100%) 141 (47%) 118 (40%) 120 (41%) 75 (24%)
East Asia (2011) 28:21–36 2727
the choice of an especially resonant focal point (like Xu), or an existing high profile
(like Chung).
Blogging as a Feature of Other Web-Based Communications
We have reported above that the scale of blogging in Taiwan and Korea is very high
compared to western cases such as the United Kingdom. However we do not have
any indication of whether this is because blogging as a medium is particularly
popular in Taiwan and Korea, or whether it reflects the enthusiastic uptake of webbased
tools more generally. Blogs are one of an array of web-based tools available to
politicians, ranging from traditional websites or homepages to Web 2.0 applications
such as social media accounts (e.g. Facebook) and microblogs (e.g. Twitter).3
In
order to put the scale of blogging in the context of other communication tools, we
collected data on legislators’ other web tools. The distribution of current legislators’
web-based tools at time of writing in September 2010 is set out in Table 1 below.
This includes the 13 legislators who were elected in bi-elections in Taiwan in spring
2010 and the eight Korean members elected in bi-elections in July 2010. Legislators
are separated according to their electoral district, i.e. those with a national
constituency chosen by party-list PR, those representing geographically defined
constituencies, and in Taiwan, the seats reserved for Lowland and Highland
Aborigines. The ‘blog’ column records the total number of blogs recorded since
2008, including those that have been infrequently updated or can now be considered
abandoned. ‘Effective blog’ on the other hand records only blogs that have been
updated with new content within one month of the time of writing. Our measure of
‘social media’ is restricted to the market leading services, i.e. Facebook and Wretch
in Taiwan and Facebook and Cyworld in Korea. The ‘microblog’ category is
similarly limited to market leading services, Twitter and Plurk in Taiwan and Twitter
in Korea.
In terms of Web 2.0 applications, blogs are currently the most popular tool in both
cases. However, by recording only market leading services it is possible that our
measures underestimate the level of take-up of social media and microblogs. In any
case, the speed of uptake of social media and microblogging in the past year has
been remarkable, with a majority of current users starting their accounts within that
time. Indeed, despite the popularity of websites among Korean legislators, we see a
shift to Web 2.0 tools and a trend towards legislators embracing multiple online
presences, usually with a hub based around a blog or social media site. Taiwanese
legislators are especially likely to use their blog as their online hub, linking to social
media, video sharing, microblog and other accounts. Korean legislators all maintain
a homepage linked from the institutional website, but the level of substantive and
interactive material is low and in general we find evidence to support Park and Kluver’s
claim that ‘politicians are gradually moving towards minihompy’ [29, p. 514], recorded
3
Microblogs differ from blogs in that users are restricted by microblog services to posting their message
in a maximum number of characters, typically 140. This allows users to post short timely messages, often
linking to other content by hyperlink, but does not allow the nuances or depth of analysis that blogs allow.
Microblog users can choose to follow the feed of other users (who can follow them in turn), so that
microblogging has a stronger networked structure.
28 East Asia (2011) 28:21–36
under ‘social media’ in Table 1 above. Comparing our contemporary data with the
earlier findings reported by Park and Kluver [29, p. 507], confirms that the number of
Korean legislators using blogs and minhompies has increased markedly in the last
three years.
The uptake of blogging, social media and microblogging by legislators in Taiwan
and Korea is proportionally similar. In Taiwan the differences between legislator
types are negligible, but in Korea, legislators with a national constituency lag far
behind their constituency based counterparts. This is particularly pronounced in the
case of social media and microblogging, where constituency based legislators are
many times more likely to have an account. This supports the argument that
constituency based legislators need to work harder in order to increase their
profiles, but further research is required on how legislators are using these media
before we can say anything more concrete. What we can say is that blogging is
currently the most popular Web 2.0 tool for Taiwanese and Korean legislators.
Social media and microblogging are proliferating rapidly, but at present it seems
that they are adding an additional layer to legislators’ online communications rather
than replacing blogs.
Is Blogging Solely Campaign Driven?
If the potential benefits of blogging are to be felt over the long term, it is important that
blogs are not linked ephemerally to campaign periods. We have reported above that, at
time of writing in autumn 2010, around 40 per cent of Taiwanese and Korean legislators
have an effective blog. That is, at mid-point in the legislative electoral cycle in both cases,
around 40 per cent of legislators are blogging. As a prima facie observation, it would
appear that blogging is not solely driven by campaign behaviour. One way to examine this
issue more closely is to identify when legislators began their blogs. We distinguish
between three types of blogging legislators, based on when they began blogging. The
‘pioneers’ began one year before the most recent legislative elections. ‘Opportunists’
began blogging in the 12 months preceding the election. ‘Latecomers’ started their blogs
at some point after the last legislative election; early in 2008 in both cases. The sample we
use is all legislators originally elected to the institutions in January 2008 in Taiwan and
April 2008 in Korea, i.e. we exclude legislators who were elected (in both cases) in bielections
in 2010.
The earliest blogs in both Taiwan and Korea were established in spring 2004
and many bloggers have posted several hundred times. The distribution of
legislators divided by the time they began blogging is set out in Table 2 below.
In Taiwan, one third of blogging legislators (33 per cent) were pioneers, while
nearly half (46 per cent) were opportunists. All four Aborigine bloggers were
latecomers. In Korea, there were more pioneers (37 per cent), and all of them sat in
the previous legislature. A lower proportion of blogging legislators in Korea were
opportunists (34 per cent). All of the opportunists and latecomers in Korea were
first-time legislators. Dividing by legislator type, nearly two thirds of the group of
18 at-large blogging legislators in Taiwan were pioneers, starting more than a year
ahead of the election. Five were latecomers who did not start their blogs until after
the election and just two were opportunists. Of these 18 blogs, 13 are still current.
East Asia (2011) 28:21–36 2929
By contrast, constituency based legislators appears to have had greater instrumental
motivations, with 70 per cent starting their blogs in the run up to the election.
Additional data collection shows that Taiwanese constituency based legislators
were also much more likely to start a blog during electoral contests where their
competitors had one. Posting activity was more intense during the election period
for the majority of constituency based bloggers; but not their national constituency
counterparts for whom it declined. In some cases, constituency based legislators
increased their blogging activity by a factor of twenty times during campaign
season. This appears indicative of strategic considerations, but cannot explain why
so many blogs survive beyond the campaign. In Korea, national legislators were
less pioneering than in Taiwan or their constituency based colleagues. As in
Taiwan, our additional data collection reveals that Korean opportunists were more
likely to start a blog if their election opponent also had one. Strategic
considerations may be obvious in this instance, but less so in the case of the
latecomers (29 per cent of all Korean bloggers). Further work is required to assess
whether these decisions are based on a desire to connect with citizens following
election, or other strategic considerations.
What are Legislators Blogging About?
In this and the following section, we use a dual coding scheme to record the
content and the function of legislators’ blogs. First, blog posts were coded
according to four types of substantive content; local issues, national issues,
international issues, and personal non-political content [13, p. 32]. The unit of
coding is the blog post itself, rather than disaggregating posts into individual
words and phrases. To counter the issue of the changing number of effective blogs,
we collected data during four week-long periods between March 2008 and
December 2009. The sample at each point in time included all effective blogs at
that time, i.e. blogs that had been updated with new content within one month.
Data was generated by manual content analysis of all of the blog posts collected
during the timeframe. The proportional distribution of blog posts on our four
dimensions is shown in Table 3 below. Reporting the proportion of posts controls
for the changing number of effective blogs and allows us to make comparisons
between the two cases and the two types of legislator. During the data collection
Table 2 Take up by time period (n)
District Pioneers Opportunists Latecomers
Taiwan National 14 3 7
Constituency 13 34 6
Total 27 (33%) 37 (46%) 17 (21%)
Korea National 2 3 12
Constituency 47 44 25
Total 49 (37%) 45 (34%) 39 (29%)
30 East Asia (2011) 28:21–36
period no aborigine representatives in Taiwan had an effective blog and so are
excluded from the following table.
The first thing to notice is that Korean legislators are posting substantially more
content than their counterparts in Taiwan, after controlling for the higher number of
Korean bloggers. One potential explanation for this finding is that Korean legislators
appear to treat their blogs as a means for personal expression, much more so than
legislators in Taiwan. Consider that Taiwanese legislators’ blogs contain 2–3 per cent of
‘personal’ content, whereas their Korean counterparts’ blogs contain between 28
(national) and 37 per cent (constituency) of posts where the content was predominantly
personal. If Korean legislators are treating their blogs in a more personal way, like an
online journal that characterizes a large proportion of blogs generally, it is
understandable that they will update their blogs more often. Taiwanese legislators are
more likely to post on political issues and, with a few exceptions, avoid making personal
statements. This contrasts with legislators in both Korea and the United Kingdom, who
use ‘personal and domestically-contextualized accounts’ to appear down-to-earth and
accessible [7, p. 10]. In Taiwan, however, there are obvious age and gender
distinctions, with younger, particularly women legislators, using more engaging
designs and personal language.
Not surprisingly, national legislators in both cases focus more on national issues,
particularly in Taiwan, where post content is dominated by national political issues.
Constituency based legislators in Taiwan are also more likely to focus on national issues
than their Korean counterparts. The big surprise is that the lowest proportion of post
content for Korean constituency based legislators, was local issues. By contrast,
Taiwanese constituency based legislators focus on local issues in more than one third of
their posts. Furthermore, although these data are not included in Table 3, additional data
collection reveals that concentration on local issues increases to 80 per cent of total
content during the official campaign period. Again, there is substantial variation
between individual legislators. Some constituency based legislators focused entirely on
local issues. Others, such as LIN Yishi and GUAN Biling, barely addressed local
issues, which can be explained by Lin’s role as Kuomintang (KMT) Whip and Guan’s
role as the Director of the DPP’s Policy Centre.
What Functions Do Blogs Serve?
In order to capture the purpose of each blog post, the same sample of blogs was recoded
to identify five different functions [13]. The first, ‘solve,’ refers to posts that
Table 3 Proportional distribution of Blog content (%)
District Local National International Personal Posts (n)
Taiwan National 3 89 6 2 67
Constituency 35 59 3 3 198
Korea National 2 56 14 28 173
Constituency 11 38 14 37 1318
East Asia (2011) 28:21–36 3131
introduced substantive problems with the explicit intention of raising and discussing
potential solutions with constituents. ‘Explain’ refers to explaining policy positions
or the actions of the individual or her party. ‘Promote’ records posts that publicize
activities, emphasize achievements or refer to the legislator’s own events. ‘Criticize’
is a measure of posts where the main purpose was to criticize an opponent or the
opposing party. Finally, ‘inform,’ records posts where the purpose was simply to
provide information, usually contextual or background information about an issue or
event. Table 4 shows the proportional distribution of post functions.
There are several substantial and significant differences between Korean and
Taiwanese legislators’ blogs, although explaining a position is the major function for
both legislator types in both cases. Explaining a position or action most often
involved posts along the lines of ‘I support this position because…’ Although one
can sometimes detect a defensive attitude (and spin) in such posts, it is encouraging
that legislators are using the blog medium to explain to their constituents why they
support particular policies or ideological positions. Two major differences between
Taiwanese and Korean legislators are in terms of problem solving and criticism. For
Korean legislators, especially constituency based ones, raising problems with the
express intention of stimulating debate on how to solve them, is a major part of their
blog content. Problem solving is much less prominent for Taiwanese legislators, who
are much more likely to use their blogs to criticize their opponents. Criticism was a
particularly prominent function of national legislators’ blogs, with nearly one quarter
(23 per cent) of all posts. By contrast, explicit criticism of opponents is negligible in
the Korean blogs. This is not to say that Korean legislators do not criticize their
opponents, but unlike Taiwanese, they rarely do so in their blogs.
How Interactive are Representatives’ Blogs?
We have argued above that the most attractive feature of the blog medium is its
potential for promoting dialogue. One way of exploring the level of interactivity in
blogs is to look at the comments left by visitors to each blog. Drawing on Hargittai
et al. [14] the comments generated by every blog post in the sample were coded on
six dimensions. ‘Agree’ and ‘Disagree’ record comments indicating support or
discord on the substance of a post. ‘Redirect’ records comments that provided new
information or redirected the conversation. ‘Debate’ refers to horizontal debate
between people making comments. Finally, ‘Question’ records instances of
commenters asking a legislator a question and an off-topic category. The distribution
Table 4 Proportional distribution of Blog functions (%)
District Problem
solving
Explain
position
Promote
activities
Criticize
opponent
Provide
information
Taiwan National 6 31 11 23 29
Constituency 7 47 9 8 29
Korea National 22 54 15 0 9
Constituency 34 36 9 1 20
32 East Asia (2011) 28:21–36
of comments is set out in Table 5. Although not shown in Table 5, instances of
legislators responding to comments were also recorded.
Just as blogs vary in the size of their audience, so the number of comments also
varies: and naturally there is a strong correlation between the two. Francoli and Ward
found similar variation in the blogs of MPs in the United Kingdom [13, p. 31]. It is no
surprise that well known legislators with established blogs posting on ‘controversial’
topics attracted the most interest. An obvious example from Taiwan is the post in
which legislator YAN Qingbiao addressed being sentenced to prison for firearms
possession, which generated several hundred comments. Although many comments
simply celebrated his demise or pledged allegiance to him, there was also serious
discussion about what Yan’s conviction meant for the quality of representation and
democracy in Taiwan. By contrast many posts failed to stimulate any comments, even
on blogs with substantial traffic. This suggests either that post content failed to
resonate, or that users are content to browse for information without commenting.
The idea that web users can easily avoid cognitive dissonance by seeking out
confirmatory information for existing beliefs has some support in our data. A
majority of comments voiced agreement with the content of the blog post,
suggesting that legislators are using their blogs to narrowcast their ideas to existing
supporters. Redirecting the conversation by extending the original argument or
providing new information was a common feature of comments in Taiwanese blogs.
These comments often took the form of describing personal experiences and cited or
linked to other sources. In some cases these shared experiences led to constructive
discussions between users, although in most cases, horizontal debate between
readers (‘debate’) was less constructive.
In Korea the number of comments was uniformly low, averaging less than one
comment per post. In the majority of cases, Korean blog posts failed to generate any
responses at all. These data do not indicate whether this is a feature of political or
blogging behaviour. Korean legislators also made no effort to reply to those who did
make comments. The extent to which Taiwanese legislators replied to comments was
much higher, particularly among constituency based legislators, many of whom
made a consistent effort to answer questions and to converse with visitors to their
blogs. Taiwanese blog users were also likely to ask direct questions, often taking the
form of asking a legislator’s opinion about something that had happened to the
person commenting or something they had witnessed. Sometimes there was an
implied desire for restitution, while other questioners made direct pleas for a
legislator to intervene in their troubles. No such entreaties were present in the
Korean blogs.
Table 5 Distribution of comments (n)
District Agree Disagree Redirect Debate Question Total
Taiwan National 27 20 21 2 5 75
Constituency 153 67 45 25 14 379
Korea National 3 0 0 1 0 4
Constituency 127 1 3 63 0 194
East Asia (2011) 28:21–36 3333
Conclusion
Recent research in advanced western democracies consistently shows that
‘representative institutions have been looking increasingly distant from and
irrelevant to citizens’ [13, p. 28]. It is suggested that one contributing factor to
this malaise is a ‘crisis of public communication’ [2], in which there is an absence of
direct and interactive communication between representatives and citizens. Given
this context, some western scholars have been attracted to the potential of new
communication tools like blogging to re-establish a connection between constituents
and their elected representatives. However, little research to date has focused on
democracies in East Asia, despite the similarly declining health of public attitudes
and the high levels of internet penetration and usage in tech-based economies and
tech-savvy societies. Comparing the practice of blogging among legislators in
Taiwan and Korea, this article demonstrates that these cases should not be neglected,
if only for the sheer scale of the phenomenon, which is substantially more common
than in the United Kingdom, Canada or Australia [13,36].
Compared to western institutions, the scale, consistency of use and reach of blogs
in Taiwan and Korea are impressive. Blogging is not solely driven by a concern for
gaining advantages during election campaigns. Numerous blogs have attracted large
audiences: some counted in millions of visits. The quality of information being made
to blog users is generally high, with legislators addressing important substantive
issues in a frank and unmediated way. These are encouraging findings, but the level
of interactive communication appears to be quite low. Dialogue is virtually absent in
the Korean legislators’ blogs. In Taiwan dialogue is happening, both vertically and
horizontally, but many conversations fail to get off the ground and dialogue between
citizen users often deteriorates into name calling. Although our data do not reveal
who is accessing the blogs, the observation that a majority of comments voice
agreement suggests that existing supporters constitute the majority of users engaging
interactively, even if we cannot be sure about the wider ‘reading only’ audience.
Blogs and other tools that hold the promise of improving communication between
citizens and officials are clearly worthy of further investigation, particularly as
legislators are increasingly adopting social media and microblogging, with their even
more interactive and networked formats.
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