Mediated Political and Social Participation: Examining the Use of the Internet by Mongolian Government and Civil Society Institutions

ABSTRACT

This study examines how governmental and civil society institutions in Mongolia use online discussion forums and whether or not these institutions benefit politically and socially from that use. By integrating the notion of civic culture proposed by Dahlgren (2005), and that of “zero institution” by Dean (2003), this study discusses the use of online participation by Mongolian government and civil society institutions and the issues of the digital democracy based on data gathered from 23 qualitative in-depth interviews conducted in 2005. Mongolian institutions are striving to use the Internet for democratic purposes, indicated by their efforts to use discussion forums for public participation in various ways; however, mediated political participation is also being molded by old institutional routines and the challenges inherent in newly established institutions. These limiting factors have not prevented a shifting of power, to some extent influenced by the Internet, among Mongolian institutions in recent years.

KEYWORDS:

• Mongolia
• online forums
• civil society
• public sphere
• zero institution
• civic culture
• post-communism

Acknowledgments

Undrahbuyan Baasanjav is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Temple University, and she earned her Ph.D. from Ohio University in 2006. The author would like to thank all of the interviewees in Mongolia; David Shafie and Don Flournoy for their support; and John Borczon for editing the article.

Notes

1. The Freedom House (2006), an agency evaluating the democratic development on the global scale, evaluated Mongolia as a “free” country based on political rights and civil liberty criteria, while its neighbors and other Central Asian countries are ranked as “partially free” or “not free.” However, Transparency International issued a contradicting evaluation citing the high level of corruption (Coleman & Kaposi, 2006; Transparency International, 2006).

2. The biggest producers of telecommunications equipment—China, Korea, and Japan—are among the biggest investors and economic partners in Mongolia. Japan is the biggest official source for development aid (ODA), and 50% of all Japanese investment in Mongolia goes to the telecommunications sector via companies like MobiCom, a leading mobile phone joint venture company with Japanese Sumitomo and KDD. Korean Telecom owns 49% of Mongolia's Telecom, and the second mobile phone operator SkyTel in Mongolia is a joint company with Korean SK Telecom (ADB, 2003).

3. Known in the West as Genghis Khan.

4. The legislative branch is unicameral and is called the State Great Khural with 76 seats elected by popular vote to serve four-year terms. The executive branch is headed by the president, who is elected by popular vote for a period of four years. The president has the power to veto bills, but he or she can be overruled by a two-thirds majority of the Parliament. The Parliament appoints the Prime Minister and the Cabinet in consultation with the President.

5. Historically, philosophical debates on citizenship emerge from three main perspectives: libertarian, emphasizing the citizen's personal autonomy and freedom of choice; republican, advocating dialogue and deliberation over public issues to solve common problems; and communitarian, highlighting the interest of historically specific and culturally different communities, self-realization, and identity (Hoff et al., 2000).

6. An institution is defined variedly, especially in less-established democratic countries like Mongolia. Bellamy and Taylor (1998) define an institution as an entity having (a) established routines; (b) epistemic communities of “professional and occupational groups whose members rely on common funds of knowledge, memory, and skills and that promote specific interpretations and paradigms; ” and (c) actor networks of people with “different roles, expertise, and domains” (p. 158).

7. There is little available and reliable empirical evidence of digital democracy practices in post-democratic countries, partly due to the long history of censorship of information during the socialist time (Coleman & Kaposi, 2006; Dimitrova & Beilock, 2005; Johnson, 2003; Kolko et al., 2003; and Undrahbuyan, 2006).

8. Undrahbuyan's (2006) study grouped those 157 Web sites of Mongolian institutions into six groups: (a) government, (b) research and academic institutions, (c) non-governmental institutions, (d) media and Internet, (e) political and interest groups, and (f) diaspora.

9. This study uses pseudonyms for its interviewees because some interviewees gave permission to reveal their names, and others did not.

10. The Secret History of Mongols is a book describing the rise of Chinghis Khan, his empire, and his military campaigns.

11. Olloo.mn, a new online media site, claimed that it has 25,000 visitors on average each day (Bayar, personal communication, July 7, 2005).

12. The user base of the MGLClub Web site grew to 50,000 within five years (Tuul, personal communication, June 30, 2005).

13. One of the interviewees, Bat, said that “donor money of 300 million dollars a year in the one-billion-dollar Mongolian economy brings some changes to Mongolia” (Bat, personal communication, July 14, 2005). Other official sources of information on the economic development of Mongolia confirm his estimates. The EIU estimate of the GDP of Mongolia in 2004 was US$1.2 billion, and foreign aid received by Mongolia for the period 1991–2002 reached US$2.9 billion (yearly estimate is US$241.6 million) in the form of mostly emergency aid without including loans and other developmental assistance (EIU, 2005).

14. To maintain the socialist regime, the communist party attacked counter-revolutionaries, monks, religious recalcitrants, feudal or capitalist elements, and critical intelligentsia. The number of people affected during these purges varies from one document to another, since information was censored and controlled tightly during the socialist days. Some sources state that there were 35,800 killed and imprisoned from 1930 to 1950; other accounts claim 100,000 killed and imprisoned during the same period (M. Rossabi, 2005: see the chapter by Dashpurev & Soni). Sanders (1987) states that there were 800 monasteries with 80,000 monks and 7,700 jas (monastery properties) in Mongolia at the beginning of the 1930s. By the 1980's, there was only one operating monastery; a few reserved monasteries operated as museums, and around 1,000 monks lived in Mongolia. The entire population of Mongolia was less than one million at that time.

15. The communist party “nomenklatura system” (Spark & Reading, 1998, p. 32) is a system where professionals are chosen based on their loyalty to the communist party.

16. Wright (2006b) analyzed the relationship between censorship and moderation in British government initiated forums, Downing Street's Policy Forum, and Citizen Space's E-democracy Forum.

17. Mongolia is administratively divided into 21 aymags or provinces.

18. Tugrig is the Mongolian currency, approximately 1,177 of which equals US$ 1 on July 27, 2006.

19. This dissertation studies the use of the Internet by Mongolians who mostly left the country after 1990. It does not discuss the use of the Internet among Mongolian ethnic groups in Inner Mongolia in China, or in Buriatya in Russia.

20. The South Korean government estimates that there are around 27,000 Mongolians living in South Korea, some 15,000 of which are there illegally (EIU, December 2005).

21. According to the Government of South Korea, the remittance money the Mongolians in Korea have transmitted is US$22 million.

Johnson, C. (2003). Information networks: Investigating the information behavior of Mongolia's urban residents. Unpublished dissertation, University of Toronto.