Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

This paper aims to examine the key questions of how social media affect satisfaction and trust in government of the youth and their implications on policymaking by using Hong Kong as a case study. This is a theory-guided and empirical-based paper to assess the impact of social media on creating the “echo-chamber” effect in influencing the perception of the youth towards government. It is part of a research project funded by the Center for Youth Studies of The Chinese University of Hong Kong. We have conducted a territory-wide random telephone survey of the youth aged 15-29 using the mobile phone numbers, resulting in an unique and valuable dataset that should be more comprehensive and reliable than other telephone surveys relying on only the land line telephone numbers.

Around the globe, there is a general decrease in the level of satisfaction and trust in government among citizens, particularly in the youth, which is often suspected to be linked with their heavy utilization of the Internet and social media. Theories of the Internet technology emphasize its capabilities in political communication and mobilization to significantly transform policymaking and governance by redistributing power among political actors. Importantly, the rise of social media or Web 2.0 also shape the values and beliefs of their users. As the net-generation, the youth often naturally becomes the center of concern and debate in policy and research on this topic. This paper should fill some important gaps in the previous studies which are often confined to a binary approach. Discussion is usually shifted between the optimistic view that social media would alleviate the problem of democratic deficit to lead to a rise of youth engagement and the pessimistic view that it would convert them into disaffected insurgents. It is unsure how social media will affect political values and policy orientation of the youth, including who are being mobilized, why and how. Does social media serves mainly as an enabler to reinforce the already engaged youth or as a new stimulus to mobilize a new group of youth who is not engaged before? Is it possible, if so, how the youth may be transformed via social media into a group who distrusts political institutions, representative politics, and mainstream media, and engage mainly in non-traditional, leaderless, individualized forms of participation? In order to answer the research question, this study compare the level of use of social media, particularly on the extent social media serve as their major source of information on public affairs, and the level of satisfaction and trust in government of the youth. As an international city with a high level of penetration of social media among the youth which has witnessed a major social movement, the Umbrella Movement of 2014, Hong Kong provides a good setting for addressing these research questions. While Hong Kong is the major case in the study, as a global city-state with advanced economic and social development, its findings should be able to be generalized to many post-industrial countries with similar levels of development.