When Democracy Goes
Online
In the United States, 90% of registered
voters are already Internet users, and 40% surf the web for political information. Michael
Cornfield, research director of the Democracy Online Project at the George Washington
University, Washington D.C., writes on new forms of political opinion making.
During the last week of 2000 presidential
campaign, a flurry of incidents signaled the arrival of online communication in
campaigning. Several websites offered to match supporters of Gore and Nader so that the
former would win the election, but the latter would attain 5% of the vote and be eligible
for public funding in 2004. The website of the Republican National Committee was denied
service during crucial get-out-the-vote hours on Election Day. Most dramatically, the Gore
campaign relied on the net to learn that Bush's margin in Florida collapsed in the dead of
the night, prompting the Democrat to reverse his concession and challenge the result.
While the Internet is transforming the ways
in which politicians' campaign for support, it is not shifting power among institutions or
classes, and with the notable exception of privacy, it is not changing the issues on the
public affairs agenda. The coming of online politics, then, does not portend a revolution.
However, the transformation of political style carries with it an important challenge. New
communication protocols and practices must be devised, advanced, explored, and instituted
in order for democratic values to be upheld.
Campaign politics in the United States
revolves round "message development", a strategic process embedded at every
stage and in every function in complex, expensive and customized uses of technology.
During the 1990s, the Internet became part
of the process, although politics has adapted more slowly than business, education and
society. This is to be expected. Politicians need majorities, not market shares, and until
80% or more of the electorate uses the new medium, politicians will be understandably
cautious about it.
E-mail networks of supporters: The
phenomenon of the campaign website illustrates the state of e-politics. Campaigns can't
rely on websites to attract attention; people must choose to go view them. For this basic
reason, websites lack the instant appeal to politicians of television, advertisements,
telemarketing operations, and leafleting drives. However, campaigns can build e-mail
networks of supporters with the contact information people deposit at websites. This makes
websites valuable as an intermediate stop in what will become a common sequence of
political publicity: invite visitors to the site, impress them with multimedia
presentations of campaign positions, and obtain enough e-mail addresses to pay for the
site many times over in volunteer time and donor money.
Citizens, journalists, and public
intellectuals can do more than hope: they can help set boundaries of conduct for
politicians as democracy moves online. They should push campaigns to document their
positions, to develop and adhere to a privacy policy, to disclose financial contributors
in real time, and to make the most of interactive forums. Since online communication is
user-driven and very public, idealists have more leverage than in mass communications.
Someone disappointed by a message on the Internet can forward it to others. A post-2000
election poll revealed that many people do forward messages about public affairs.
Again, this is not a revolution: only one
in a hundred net users donated money to candidates, and only one in ten contacted interest
groups. Participating in campaign remains an elite activity, and online activists, like
offline, tend to be educated and well off. However, tens of millions of people used the
Internet to communicate about politics. That is a resource pool which campaigns will
increasingly seek to draw from-and as they do, democracy will be the winner if politicians
adhere to practices and protocols which uphold such principles as free expression, social
tolerance, government accountability, and public deliberation.
Reform and Cooperation
will bring a New Age
Kim Dae Jung, President Republic of
Korea
I must express my profound regret over the
fact that the nation's economic recovery is slowing, knowing how painful and disappointed
you must be. The direct cause of the current economic difficulties is the stagnant economy
in the United States, Japan, the European Union and Southeast Asia. But there are
indications that our failure to complete reform weakened our competitiveness in
international markets.
Though the reform efforts of the past three
and a half years, we have succeeded in overcoming the foreign exchange crisis and have
laid a foundation for becoming a first rate country in the 21 St century. We have paid the
entire $19.5 billion loan we took out from the IMF, three years before the due date. What
is more, we have the fifth largest dollar reserve in the world, close to $100 billion.
The creation of new labor relations is
absolutely necessary for the development of our economy. Companies must earn the trust of
workers by clearly disclosing their business conditions, and workers must concentrate
their energies in raising productivity. Profits must be divided fairly. Reform and
cooperation is the way for both the management and the labor to coexist.
Along with reform in four major areas-the
financial corporate, labor and public sectors-we must rapidly revitalize our economy by
increasing domestic demand. To do this, we must promote investment in research and
development as well as in plants and facilities. We will continue to rationally revise
related systems to actively promote exports and back up capital investment by big
corporations.
The Organization for Economic Cooperation
and Development recently announced that the popularization of the super-speed information
network in Korea leads the world. In an age when knowledge and information are changing as
fast as the speed of light, we will make utmost efforts for reform to maximize our growth
potential.
In the past, we depended mainly on
semi-conductors, shipbuilding, automobiles, iron, steel and textiles for exports. But in
the future, we must develop such next generation growth industries as IT, bioengineering,
cultural content, environmental technology and mano-technology in parallel.
At the same time, we must be able to
produce highly competitive and profitable products in all industries, not only automobiles
and textiles but also in agriculture, by grafting them to the knowledge based economy.
Our top products are lagging far behind
those of the US, China, Japan, Taiwan and the others in the world market, where the winner
takes all. Now, we must catch up with them by trying to take two steps for their every
one. With our intellectual ability and potential, we can do it.
The Incheon International Airport will
become a hub in Northeast Asia. The Busan port is the third-largest container harbor in
the world. When the railway between the South and the North is reconnected, Korea will
become a center for transportation and economic activities in the sky, land and sea
linking the Eurasian continent with the Pacific. The age of Korean Peninsula, in name and
substance, will come. This is not a mere dream.
The administration is expanding the four
major types of insurance-the national pension, unemployment insurance, health insurance
and industrial disaster insurance-in addition to the system of guaranteeing a minimum
living standard for low-income workers. We are now providing a social safety net,
comparable to those of the advanced nations, that protects people from unemployment,
diseases, old-age and poverty. Based on this, we will make further efforts to offer a high
level of welfare services.
We experienced great unemployment chaos in
the wake of the foreign exchange crisis. However, the unemployment rate has been
stabilized at around 3 percent, lower than that of the US, Japan or the EU. We will
continue to stabilize unemployment by creating some two million jobs in three years.
We will carry out national health programs
as planned. I deeply regret that we have caused a lot of inconvenience and burden for the
people on account of the medical dispute involving the separation of hospital care and the
dispensing of medicines. However, following such birth pains, we are forming a new medical
care system on a world-class level.
Meanwhile, we will come up with a
comprehensive health improvement plan within this year and implement it from next year. We
will go on strengthening a system to give free and early cancer checkups to low income
workers. We will improve emergency medical care across the board. We will also try to work
out a plan so that people who are suffering from difficult-to-treat diseases can receive
medical benefits. We will actively develop a system for treating the elderly through
special insurance schemes. We will expand facilities for sports and leisure activities to
help improve public health.
We will try to relieve the poor from
housing worries. We will increase the rate of housing supply, which is currently at 94.1
percent, to 100 percent by 2003. In particular we will build 200,000 rental houses in
three years by investing 8.4 trillion won; people who move into these homes will pay half
the going rate for rent. At the same time, the government will provide low-income citizens
who have no homes of their own with low interest loans to make up 70 percent of the cost
of the house they buy or rent.
By the end of my tenure, we will realize
transparency in administration, raise efficiency and eliminate factors that contribute to
corruption by initiating an electronic government. We will also drastically improve
government services for citizens.
We will make our best efforts to increase
the earnings of farmers and fishermen. We will actively support farmers so that they can
increase their earnings by helping them raise high-quality, profitable and competitive
agriculture produce and by improving e-transactions and transportation.
We will sharply reduce the tax burden on
wage earners by reducing taxes on fixed incomes. We will help workers build up assets
through a system of dividing profits based on merit, and encourage employees to own shares
of their companies. We will actively consider reducing the tax burden on self-employed
workers, since their income reports are becoming increasingly more accurate due to greater
use of credit cards.
How can we relieve our current
difficulties? We can do so through resolute reform and national cooperation. Our people
have the vision and potential to make Korea a first-class nation in the world. A world
famous consulting firm has said that our country has the potential to become the seventh
largest economy in 10 years. Pain accompanies reforms. However, we can overcome pain if we
cooperate with one mind. Let us open a hope-filled future by overcoming today's
difficulties through reform and cooperation. We can do it. Our forefathers will look after
us and protect us.
The abridged text of President Kim
Dae-Jung's August 15, 2001 speech made on economic policy. Text courtesy: Korea Now dated
August 25, 2001-Chief editor. |
