A Communicative Action Approach to Evaluating Citizen Support for a Government's Smoking Policies

Abstract

This study examines the communicative grounds of democratic legitimacy in a hybrid political system, Singapore, by applying Habermas's theory of communicative action. The theory holds that citizens will be more likely to accept the rightfulness of a political order to the extent that they recognize its orientation as being communicative, oriented to increasing reciprocal understanding with the public. Assessments of communicative action are indicated by 2 conditions: whether citizens agree with government claims and whether citizens perceive opportunities to engage in dialog with policymakers in public discourse. The communicative action approach is tested using the case of Singapore government's action on smoking control. National survey results indicate that selected validity conditions and speech conditions are positively associated with legitimacy appraisals.

Procedural Justice in Online Deliberation: Theoretical Explanations and Empirical Findings

“…The results seemingly contradict the relational model of justice, which holds that relational judgments such as neutrality, trustworthiness, and status recognition are more critical than the amount of control individuals enjoy during decision making in accounting for policy acceptance (Lind & Tyler 1988;Tyler 1988Tyler , 2000. The results of the present study also differ from past research using the communicative action approach that found a positive relationship between validity conditions and citizens' beliefs in policy legitimacy (Chang & Jacobson 2010;Chang et al 2013). The inconsistent results may be due to the different parties with which citizens deliberate.…”

“…Yet, overall, they reflect the fairness of a decision-making procedure. Chang and colleagues (Chang & Jacobson 2010;Chang, Jacobson & Zhang 2013) examined dialogic interactions between citizens and political authorities in mediated public spheres and found a positive relationship between perceived procedural justice and citizens' beliefs in policy legitimacy. In another study involving deliberation in small groups, Zhang (2015) used the speech condition criteria to evaluate discussants' procedural justice judgments and found that procedural justice was positively associated with enjoyment, satisfaction with group decisions, and intention to engage in future participation.…”

“…Two independent variables, speech conditions and validity conditions, were used to measure the discursive and substantive dimensions of procedural justice. Four speech condition items adopted from previous studies (Chang & Jacobson 2010;Chang et al 2013;Zhang & Chang 2014) were modified to measure the degree to which participants felt that they could engage in free and uncoerced dialogue on a 5-point scale (1 = strongly disagree; 5 = strongly agree): 'I had full capacity to freely raise questions about the population policies during the discussions'; 'I feel all of us had equal opportunities to express our opinions on the population issues during the discussions'; 'There was good balance in whose opinions about the population issues were being heard during the discussions'; and 'I feel the people I discussed with gave a fair consideration to what I thought about the population issues.' The results of principal component analysis showed that the four items loaded on one factor (Eigenvalue = 2.90, factor loadings between 0.83 and 0.86) and, therefore, they were computed into one combined variable, speech conditions (Cronbach's α = 0.87, M = 3.71, standard deviation (SD) = 0.67).…”

Strengthening Social Marketing Research: Harnessing “Insight” through Ethnography

“…However, a social change agenda must look beyond individual behaviour change under constrained conditions to the bigger picture that is the meso-level social system and the society in which the individual is embedded. The use of social marketing is fraught with concerns of paternalism and limits to freedom (Battle-Fisher, 2015; Chang et al, 2013; Cherrier and Gurrieri, 2014). Indeed, recent social marketing scholarship directs much attention to the neoliberal co-optation of social marketing as a structural ideology constraining capability of social marketing to effect social change (Crawshaw, 2012; Tadajewski et al, 2014).…”

Perceived Speech Conditions and Disagreement of Everyday Talk: A Proceduralist Perspective of Citizen Deliberation

“…Habermas (1990) explicitly stated the characteristics of the procedure as follows: First, all participants who have the capacity to take part in argumentation should be included, without exception; second, all participants should be guaranteed equal opportunity to contribute to the argumentation; third, no participants may be subject to repression. In a recent study (Chang & Jacobson, 2010;Chang, Jacobson, & Zhang, 2013), a three-item speech condition measure was developed on the basis of the Habermasian idea: (a) whether citizens believe that they can freely raise for discussion any problematic validity claim; (b) whether citizens believe that all citizens have a symmetrical distribution of opportunities to engage in discourse; and (c) whether citizens believe that they will receive full and fair responses.…”