Political participation in post-authoritarian regimes in the digital age

: insights from Cambodia

Abstract

This thesis draws on digital democracy in Cambodia. New technology and social media platforms played a crucial role in easing civil society’s political fear in the early 2010s, strengthening non-traditional political participation and making democracy more robust. However, later in the decade, the governmental co-optation of the digital sphere revived political fear, harming non-traditional political engagement and limiting civil society’s opportunities of using digital media to shape public institutions. In this study, I argue that the internet has had a limited positive impact on Cambodia’s democratic consolidation due to the culture of political fear, a well-embedded trait in many citizens after decades of authoritarian rule and conflict.

This investigation addresses two problematics: the relative lack of knowledge of the circumstantial elements that have influenced political participation in Cambodia – before the digital age and in the Internet era – and the impact of Cambodia’s ruling party embracing digital media in response to the earlier democratic expansion thanks to the internet. In doing so, I make three original contributions to the academic literature on digital democracy and Cambodia. First, I show that political fear has shaped political participation in Cambodia, even before the digital age. To explore contextual elements like fear, which are often overlooked by Western-centric research, qualitative methods are adequate. Second, the study integrates digital media in the intersection between fear and political participation. In the internet era, the Cambodian government has co-opted the digital sphere to create a new wave of fear, taking a toll on non-traditional political participation and outweighing the positive reach of the internet to practice politics. Third, I incorporate the political crackdown of 2017 in analysing digital democracy in Cambodia to show new technology’s limited positive reach in consolidating democracy, regardless of the earlier democratic expansion made with the internet. Although the conclusions of this thesis are specific to Cambodia, they are relevant to the broader academic literature on digital democracy because they can be transferred to other studies concerning illiberal regimes.

Date of Award	12 May 2022
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bristol
Supervisor	Egle Cesnulyte (Supervisor) & Ryerson B Christie (Supervisor)