What do young people in ASEAN expect of the ASEAN Community? Do they have a sense of regional identity in the way the Association has cultivated the “ASEAN Way” at policymaking levels in its member states? Do young people know ASEAN?

The two ten-nation surveys — the first in 2007 and the 2014 expanded update — both confirm that, among the young undergraduates in this region, there continues to be an emerging sense of identification with the region of Southeast Asia, and with ASEAN as the representative grouping for regional cooperation. Indeed, all forms of ASEAN cooperation, especially those initiated without government prodding, are what will ultimately glue the ASEAN Community together. The more often the people of Southeast Asia get together — to exchange views, help each other, or work together — the stronger the community will become, despite the diversity of culture, ethnicity, and politics. Yet, challenges remain. Young people in the region have correctly identified some of the most important: bridging the development gaps that still exist between and within the ASEAN members, and entrenching a sense of regional identity.

We can expect that as the ASEAN Community project, especially the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC), becomes a more concrete reality, there may be more dissension over the value of ASEAN. The increase in the number of Thai students being more critical of ASEAN in 2014–15 serves as a good illustration of how more information and discussion of ASEAN within the national context can bring about more critical thinking. At the same time, the Myanmar findings for 2014–15 provide exactly the reverse; with the country's chairing of ASEAN in 2014, sentiments of the students in Myanmar now track the ASEAN-enthusiast tendencies in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.

ASEAN stakeholders should thus be prepared for this, i.e. not to see contention of ASEAN's usefulness or value as a “failure” but rather see the increasing importance of ASEAN on people's future and the contention as a measure of the students’ heightened knowledge of and interest in regional integration issues. At the same time, substantial attention is needed to alleviate the unintended consequences of integration.

In the 2014 survey, we expanded the survey questionnaire to include a set of sixty triad questions. This method is adopted from cultural anthropological semantic domain analysis, and developed by principal investigator Eric C. Thompson in reference to countries generally and ASEAN countries specifically in earlier research. Triad questions ask respondents to judge similarities and differences among items (in this case, countries). The purpose of the method is to solicit and reveal what criteria respondents are using to make their judgements (i.e. to get at their cultural knowledge or understanding of a domain) rather than have the criteria predetermined by the researcher. Responses to the triad questions are used to produce aggregate similarity matrices, showing the relative similarity and difference amongst all items in the domain, as judged by the sample of respondents. These matrices in turn are subjected to correspondence analysis, through which multidimensional, cognitive maps are produced, giving a visual representation of how students from a particular university or sample as a whole think about the relationship among ASEAN nations.

METHODS AND INTERPRETATION

The “cognitive maps” presented in this report (in full, in Appendix F) provide a visual representation of the relationship among ASEAN countries based on the aggregate judgements of similarity and difference among countries within each university sample. They reflect, in a simplified form, the cultural concepts — the learned, shared knowledge — that students from each university have regarding Southeast Asia.

The maps are derived from questions of similarity and difference presented to the respondents in the form of triad questions. A triad question asks respondents to select the most different item from a set of three items. For example, if respondents are presented with “cow”, “buffalo”, and “rock”, they would almost certainly choose “rock” as different from “cow” and “buffalo”. In a triad exercise, the items are selected from among a specific domain of items — in our case, that domain is ASEAN members and the domain has ten items.

In both the 2007 and 2014 surveys, we have found that students around the region are overwhelmingly positive in their attitudes and orientations toward ASEAN. Across the region, we have found a degree of “ASEAN enthusiasm” amongst students, measured by the percentage of students who “strongly agree” with a range of questions on their perception of the importance of ASEAN and affinity for ASEAN (e.g. the degree to which they see themselves as citizens of ASEAN and see the future of ASEAN as important). In 2007, we reported that ASEAN enthusiasm was strongest in several of the newest and least affluent ASEAN nations (specifically Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam). The least degree of ASEAN enthusiasm appeared in the most affluent ASEAN members, particularly Singapore but also Brunei. Singaporean students as a group displayed an attitude of ambivalence — neither strongly negative nor sceptical, but also not overwhelmingly positive. Amongst students from most of the other ASEAN nations (Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand), the aggregate orientation was overwhelmingly positive, but not to the same “enthusiastic” degree of the members mentioned above. In 2007, we also found a particularly interesting, bimodal distribution of responses amongst students surveyed in Myanmar. The majority displayed positive attitudes similar to that of most ASEAN member states, but a significant minority responded in ways that we termed “ASEAN scepticism”. These students disagreed, or in many cases even strongly disagreed, across the same series of questions — e.g. that they did not feel ASEAN was of benefit to their nation, that they did not feel themselves citizens of ASEAN, and so on.

At the most general level, the results of the 2014 survey largely tracked with those of the 2007 survey. The overall attitudes of students across the region were positive. The greatest degree of ASEAN enthusiasm remained amongst students in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. Students in Singapore continued to display a degree of ambivalence toward ASEAN. And elsewhere, the general attitude of students toward ASEAN is strongly positive, though not enthusiastic to the degree found in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. At the same time, within this general overall similarity between the 2007 and 2014 results, there are important and instructive differences with respect to findings from particular nations. We highlight several of these differences here, and discuss them in greater detail in the remainder of this section of the report and the next.

BRUNEI

Students from the Universiti Brunei Darussalam (UBD) demonstrated generally good knowledge of ASEAN. They scored almost perfectly (98.5 per cent) on their ability to identify the ASEAN flag, replicating their performance on the 2007 survey. They also had the second highest score amongst primary university students (after Thailand) on identifying ASEAN member countries on a map of Southeast Asia. They were about average for the region in identifying the year of ASEAN's founding. Their perceptions of similarity amongst ASEAN countries was somewhat below average regionally for the economic and political domains. Bruneian students scored the highest of all primary universities in viewing ASEAN membership as beneficial to their own country and amongst the highest in seeing their country's membership as being beneficial to them personally, though when measured in terms of strong agreement (ASEAN enthusiasm), they score closer to average for the region. Overall, Bruneian students held positive views of ASEAN, common to students in the region generally. With respect to the view of Brunei held by students from other countries, as in the 2007 survey, it remains overall the least salient country generally to students from elsewhere. The tendency to report Brunei as a possible destination for work dropped somewhat in the 2014 survey, particular in Indonesia, though it remained at more than 10 per cent in both Singapore and Malaysia.

CAMBODIA

Cambodian students from the Royal University of Phnom Penh (RUPP) remained among the strongest “ASEAN enthusiasts” amongst primary university students. They remain among the most oriented toward seeing themselves as citizens of ASEAN (two-thirds “strongly agree”) and in wanting to learn about other ASEAN countries (90 per cent “strongly agreeing”). They also displayed better objective knowledge of the region as compared to the 2007 survey, with substantially higher percentages of students who could identify the ASEAN flag and year of founding, though their cartographic knowledge remained somewhat below regional averages. In both the 2007 and 2014 surveys, Cambodian students tended to see ASEAN members as similar culturally, dissimilar economically, and were evenly divided on whether ASEAN countries are similar politically.

SALIENCE TABLES

The following tables are based on responses to Q2 List Question (“List the Ten Countries in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)”). The first table shows the rank by salience of each country (item, in rows) at each primary university (columns) along with the average rank (Avg Rank) across all primary universities. Subsequent tables record the detailed results from each primary university.

Countries are ordered (ranked) by Smith's Salience Index (Smith's S), a measure of salience that combines frequency (how often a country was listed) and priority (did respondents tend to list the country earlier or later in the list). Smith's S gives a score of between one and zero to each country listed, based on frequency (how often a country was listed) and priority (how close to the top of each list a country appears). A score of 1.0 would mean that the country was listed first on every list by every student. As the score approaches zero, it indicates that the country is only listed by a few or just one student and that it comes to mind (at the end of the list) only after students have thought of all other countries.

The survey targeted students at universities across Southeast Asia. We built on the methods and survey instrument employed in the 2007 ASEAN Awareness Survey. In 2007, we sampled students at one leading, “flagship” university in each ASEAN nation. For the 2014 survey, we returned to the same primary universities and also selected additional universities in six out of the ten countries, to further test the validity of our results and to probe for within-nation variation in those nations. At each university, the questionnaire was administered in the main language of instruction for that university. For simplicity, we refer to the universities involved in both the previous survey and the current survey as the “primary universities” and the additional universities in the current survey as “additional universities”.

The primary universities were originally selected because they represented the top, public universities in each nation. Therefore the current students at those universities could be expected to represent a sample of future leaders and members of the nations’ professional classes and to be important thought-leaders of the coming generation. While their views may not necessarily be nationally representative in a statistical sense — for instance, they may vary from older generations or from less educated members of the general population — nevertheless, we can expect that their views will matter to the future of how their individual nations and the region as a whole respond to and build on the ASEAN framework in coming decades.

In 2014, we were able to successfully replicate the 2007 survey at primary universities in nine of the ten ASEAN member states, at Universiti Brunei Darussalam (Brunei), Royal University of Phnom Penh (Cambodia), Universitas Indonesia, Depok Campus (Indonesia), National University of Laos (Lao PDR), University of Malaya (Malaysia), University of the Philippines Diliman (the Philippines), National University of Singapore (Singapore), Chulalongkorn University (Thailand), and Vietnam National University, Hanoi (Vietnam). In all cases, where we refer, for purposes of brevity, to data from a nation in cross-national comparisons, we are referring to the data from the primary universities amongst our samples.

This chapter explores the practices of politician-bloggers who strategically utilized the online platform with the aim of exerting a wider sphere of influence over the voting public. It discusses how online avenues became less appealing to the politician-bloggers during the official campaigning period. The research participants revealed that they instead resorted to traditional non-mediated face-to-face canvassing during that time. Some of the factors cited for abandoning online media during the official campaigning period included the broader political economy of the media, coupled with constituencies defined by ethnicity, location, and the digital divide, as well as the preference of politician-bloggers for a personalized approach.

A key point of the chapter examines the use of the Internet as a tool for marketing political images in order to garner public support. Such usage occurred particularly in the lead-up to the general elections. Generally, most of the politician-bloggers had restricted access to the mainstream media so they turned to blogging to publish unfiltered messages to increase visibility for themselves and their party. Content included the scandals of political rivals, which indirectly helped to boost the bloggers’ image in contrast. The politician-bloggers also promoted themselves as reputable politicians worthy of public support by declaring their thoughts on issues of public interest. This can be interpreted as a blurring of boundaries between the private and public sphere. However, such boundaries were guarded when politician-bloggers did not want their personal thoughts to jeopardize the image of their political parties. Such was evident among some of the politician-bloggers who were elected following the 2008 election.

The chapter also interrogates the perception of politician-bloggers about Web practices that appeared to have a bearing on the ways they were using the online platform. It examines the emergence of a network of cyber battles that was prevalent for the election of 2013 but not for 2008. During the 2008 election many of the research participants regarded blogging as a personal endeavour and did not connect with other individuals or bloggers to establish ties or a network. Two veteran politician-bloggers treated the online tool like their “own newspapers” without any form of coordination to achieve their political goal. However, the increasing use of social networking tools like Facebook and Twitter saw the creation of fluid ties to help win the support of the voting public during the 2013 election.

This chapter discusses the use of blogs and Facebook pages in the 2008 and 2013 general elections based on findings of the content analysis and in-depth interviews with the socio-political bloggers. It highlights the trends in blog use among the relatively distinct groups of socio-political bloggers and discusses some of the key findings within the prevailing political landscape in 2008 and 2013. This helps to contextualize and present a more comprehensive picture of the manners in which the online platform was used at particular moments in an election. The ways in which the online platform was utilized seems to reflect the particular social and political culture of Malaysian society.

Firstly, the content analysis confirmed the findings of previous studies about the dominant use of blogs and social media to mobilize readers for political action (Kahn and Kellner 2004; Perlmutter 2008; Pole 2009; Lim 2009) and to express dissenting or diverse views and opinions (Keren 2006; Kulikova and Perlmutter 2007; Lim 2009) that were largely ignored by the mainstream media. These online tools enabled socio-political bloggers to encourage blog readers to take part in protest rallies and to vote in the elections.

Electoral candidates who maintained blogs during this period were able to disseminate information about their campaign activities. However, the online platform was limited in generating public discussion of issues and policies that had an impact on society. An examination of the comments of readers showed that blogging did not appear to have generated discussion or engaged readers extensively in public discourse. Some research participants expressed fear of retribution because of comments made on their blogs, they thus took extra precautions to filter certain comments. They also indicated that Facebook pages were less conducive for discussing issues of public interest.

The Malaysian blogosphere was, expectedly, more sympathetic towards the opposition than the ruling coalition, given the tight control of the mainstream media by the ruling regime. But, more importantly, the results demonstrated that blogging could be used as a tool to sway public opinion1 in the elections. In the 2008 election the contents of blogs were generally critical of the BN government and specifically negative of the then prime minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi.

The twelfth Malaysian general election held on 8 March 2008 was, in many ways, a “watershed in the country's history” (Ooi K.B, 2008, p. 6). For the first time since 1969 the Barisan Nasional's (BN) obsession for a two-thirds majority in Parliament had finally been thwarted. The opposition saw a fourfold increase in the number of its parliamentary seats, up from 20 in 2004 to 82 in 2008. The widespread victory for the opposition in urban areas was evident from it winning 10 out of 13 parliamentary constituencies in the Federal Territory. The 2008 polls also witnessed the successful election of at least 20 parliamentarians who kept and maintained a blog at that time (Hah 2012). The unprecedented outcome saw the opposition parties for the first time presenting a united front by challenging the ruling regime to straight contests in Peninsular Malaysia. The informal cooperation of the opposition, involving the Democratic Action Party (DAP), Parti Keadilan Rakyat (PKR) and Parti Islam Se-Malaysia (PAS) saw it, for the first time, being swept into power in four states — Selangor, Perak, Penang and Kedah — commonly known as the urban, western, industrialized corridor of Peninsular Malaysia. The PAS also retained its majority in Kelantan in the 2008 polls. Described as a “political tsunami” (Gan 2008), the result of the 2008 election was far removed from that of the one in 2004 when then prime minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi annihilated the opposition. In 2004 the BN won 198 out of 219 federal seats, or 90.4 per cent of the total number of parliamentary constituencies it contested.

The new political landscape endorsed at the polls in 2008 prevailed after the country's thirteenth general election, which was held on 5 May 2013. The ruling coalition's dream of regaining its traditional two-thirds majority and to win back the states of Penang, Selangor and Kelantan remained elusive. The electoral performance of the BN slid further as the opposition secured 7 more parliamentary seats. Out of a total of 222 parliamentary constituencies contested in the 2013 general election, the opposition captured 89 federal seats while the BN won 133 seats. However, the ruling coalition managed to re-capture Kedah state and held its grip on Perak.