Does Education Background Affect Digital Equal Opportunity and the Political Participation of Sustainable Digital Citizens? A Taiwan Case

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to examine the level of digital equity and political participation in Taiwan. In this study, we argue that high digital literacy and active civic participation facilitate the formation of sustainable digital citizenship. We review the development of digital education policy in Taiwan since the 1990s. Based on the nationwide survey dataset prepared by Taiwan’s National Development Council in 2018, we examine the relations between digital literacy, digital social life, the digitalized acquisition of government information, and the political participation of digital citizens. We adopt a structural equation modeling approach and perform the multi-group analysis to validate our proposed model of digital equal opportunity. The results show that there are significantly positive relations between the four digital latent variables, but no statistically significant differences between interviewees with high and low education backgrounds in the relations with these variables. In addition, our findings reveal that the digital social life of digital citizens indirectly affects their political participation through their digitalized acquisition of government information. This paper also discusses the implications of digital education policy and the formation of sustainable digital citizenship.