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Abstract
Over the past decade there is a growing concern about how state governments could exert political control upon the Internet system. Most explanations on Internet control point to the authoritarian nature of political system. It is true that in general Internet control practices are more evident in politically closed regimes and less so in fully liberal democracies. A clear match between the level of democracy and the degree of Internet freedom, however, could hardly be found in the middle of political regime continuum that contains various sorts of hybrid polities. This paper tries to look beyond the regime factor and identify the major determinants that shape Internet control outcomes in competitive (yet not fully democratic) political systems. It chooses to investigate three Southeast Asian countries, Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia, which constitute a clear mismatch between their regime types and the level of Internet control. Pointing out the indeterminacy of regime type, this paper constructs an alternative model that addresses the intensity of online transgressiveness and the capacity of online civil society. While online transgressiveness propels governments to seek Internet control strategies, online civil society represents an inhibiting force, the cohesiveness of which determines the extent to which societal resistance against Internet censorship might succeed.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank all the interviewees and acknowledge invaluable comments from William Case and the anonymous reviewers. He also thanks the Department of Asian and International Studies at the City University of Hong Kong, the Center of International Studies, and the Research Group of Cultural Security at the National University of Defense Technology for their financial support.
Notes
1. In this study, we adopt Diamond (Citation2002) and Levitsky and Way's (Citation2010) regime typology that differentiates between, according to different levels of democraticness, politically closed regime, electoral authoritarian regime, competitive authoritarian regime, electoral democracy, and liberal democracy. Getting insights from political repression studies, this research focuses on the middle range of political regimes where regime type can not sufficiently explain repressive outcomes.
2. Following Lijphart's (Citation1971: 691) argument that deviant case studies can contribute to ‘the establishment of general propositions and thus to theory-building in political science’, this study focuses on the anomalous cases of Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia, and other countries in Southeast Asia are thus given less attention.
3. In all 40 elite interviews have been conducted: 15 in Thailand, 14 in Malaysia, and 11 in Indonesia. All these interviews used semi-structured question lists. Information and data collected in these first-hand sources have been cross-checked in secondary sources such as media reports and government publications, and vice versa.
4. The notion of transgressiveness derives from the distinction, drawn by McAdam and his colleagues (Citation2001), between contained political contention and transgressive contention.
5. Statistics of Internet development in these countries are obtained from Internet World Stats, available at http://www.internetworldstats.com/asia.htm.
6. One study in 2004 identified at least 191 such reformasi-related websites established after 1998 (Tan Citation2004), which may reflect the extent of reformasi's impact on cyberspace.
7. On this score, some excellent efforts, both qualitative (e.g., Sani Citation2009) and quantitative (e.g., Gong Citation2009), have been made. All of them acknowledged the importance of the Internet in shaping the 2008 electoral outcome.
8. The eight points of Bersih movements’ demands can be viewed at their official website at http://www.bersih.org/?page_id=352.
9. The relevant data can be retrieved from https://wiki.smu.edu.sg/digitalmediaasia/Digital_Media_in_Indonesia.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Liu Yangyue
Dr Liu Yangyue has graduated recently from City University of Hong Kong. He is currently a lecturer in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, National University of Defense Technology, China. His research interests include comparative politics, international relations, and Internet politics.