As social media platforms and the internet have become an integral part of our civic and political lives, many questions about how to approach digital politics and civic engagement have emerged in the past few years. This project attempts to address some of those questions, specifically how we may think about civic education in the digital age. I begin with the premise that in the digital age, education for democracy must focus on its epistemic aspect. While proponents of aggregative forms of democracy consider vote to be the main form of citizen participation, forms of epistemic democracy such as deliberative democracy seek to contribute to social knowledge through communication amongst citizens, civil society, market players and state institutions. I initially ground my inquiry within the American context by highlighting the participatory character of the American democratic ethos. For this, I evoke John Dewey’s view of democracy as involving collective inquiry that allows both individual growth and the enrichment of collective life. Then, by examining Jürgen Habermas’ deliberative and Chantal Mouffe’s agonistic models of democracy against the backdrop of increasing digital mediation of civic and political discourse, I problematize democratic subjectivity in the digital age and suggest using Etienne Balibar’s notion of transindividuality, which he develops from 17th century philosopher Baruch Spinoza. While Habermas demonstrates that certain communication conditions are necessary for legitimate political action, Mouffe reminds us that taking into account the importance of collective affective drives can help us take seriously the plurality of our contemporary democracies. However, I argue that in the digital age the strengths of these two approaches must be adapted to the evolving materiality of the environment in which people’s lived experience takes place rather than merely kept for instances of communication that occur within state institutions. For this, Balibar’s suggestion to think of the process of freedom of speech as a public good allows us to ground discourse in the material context in which it is produced and maintained, and provides a generative way of thinking of the role of education in our times.

This dissertation investigates the question: what do we want from our democratic institutions and how should we design them to get it? I argue that we want our democratic institutions to promote cognitive political engagement among all citizens and that accomplishing this task requires focusing reform efforts on electoral institutions like mandatory voting rather than small-scale deliberative forums. Democratic theory has been dominated by deliberative theories of democracy for at least two decades. As this literature turned to the question of how to institutionalize deliberative democracy, the inherently limited scale of deliberative institutions like deliberative polling or participatory budgeting has made scholars like Simone Chambers and Jane Mansbridge worry that deliberation abandons mass democracy, and with it meaningful democratic legitimacy. I argue that such worries are well founded because the effective inclusion of all citizens, not deliberation, constitutes the most important democratic value and that as a result, participatory institutions should be arranged so as to promote inclusion, even at the cost of values like deliberation. The first part of the project advances a novel conception of inclusion based on reflective cognitive engagement with democratic politics and demonstrates the central importance of inclusion within democratic theory. The second half of the project examines different institutions for their ability to promote inclusion and finds that, in the American context, most deliberative forums as currently designed are too small and feeble to do so but that adequately reformed electoral institutions like mandatory voting can promote inclusion and reflection well. One important implication is that in a world of limited activist resources and public taste for reform, democratic reformers in the United States should focus their attention on electoral organization and institutions rather than small-scale experiments if they hope to affect mass democracy. This project sits at the nexus of empirical research on political participation, comparative institutional design, and the ethics of democratic citizenship. It considers questions like: when the resources of democratic reformers are finite, what is the most important goal for them to pursue? How demanding of the time, attention, and resources of its citizens must a flourishing democracy be? May citizens opt out of such demands? What specific reforms are most efficient at achieving the proper priorities of democratic theory? Answering these questions requires combining empirical insights about political behavior and the performance of different institutional arrangements with normative and ethical arguments regarding the priorities of democratic theory and the nature of democratic citizenship.

Research into the citizen political participation via social media is dominated by two grand narratives. In the first, new media are seen as empowering society, while the second portrays the Internet as the State’s ultimate tool for manipulating citizens. This research employed content analysis, critical discourse analysis and interview to compare and contrast the nature of political participation and deliberation on Weibo in [Hong Kong and mainland] and by [VIPs and causal users] on 2012 Hong Kong Chief Executive Election, and how the online censorship shaped their political participation and deliberation regarding this case. Mixed methods used with theoretical framework (e.g. democracy, digital democracy, deliberative democracy, e-participation and citizenship) in this research has demonstrated the role of Weibo both ‘tool’ ‘forum’ and ‘object’ to understand deliberative democracy while citizens used for political participation and deliberation. Dynamic forms of self-censorship demonstrated how the online censorship shaped the citizens’ political participation and deliberation through dynamic explicit or implicit ways on Weibo in this case.

中国的私营企业主支持民主吗？此研究发现整体上他们拥有民主价值观念，但是他们认为民主在中国不可行，所以他们选择维持现状。通过分析一份全国性问卷调查数据，本文指出中国的私营企业主比其他的中产阶级和劳动阶层更加可能支持民主价值观念，在控制了相关的政治性，区域性和基本的个人特征的影响之后，这样的差异依然存在。用结构化方程模型分析一份针对 2071 位私营企业主的问卷调查数据进一步表明私营企业主的民主价值观念并不受他们与政府的政治联系的影响。和政府有各种联系的私营企业主并没有比其他企业主更加保守。然而通过与他们的深度访谈，文章发现拥有民主价值观念的私营企业家同时也支持政府。他们认为民主在中国并不可行，至少在目前这个阶段。因此，他们倾向于选择维持现状。 / Do private entrepreneurs in China support democracy? This study shows that in general, private entrepreneurs find democracy desirable, but their concern with the feasibility of democracy predisposes them toward maintaining the status quo. Drawing on a national survey, this research indicates that Chinese private entrepreneurs are more likely to have democratic values than the non-entrepreneurial middle class and working class, controlling the effects of relevant political, regional and demographic factors. An analysis of a survey data on 2071 private entrepreneurs further shows that politically embedded entrepreneurs are not significantly less likely to endorse democratic values than non-politically embedded entrepreneurs. In-depth interviews suggest that private entrepreneurs who have democratic values tend to argue that democracy is infeasible in China, at least in the near future. In real life, they adopt a pro-government stance in their economic, social and political activities. / Detailed summary in vernacular field only. / Jin, Shuai. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2012. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 48-51). / Abstracts also in Chinese.