Constructing issue network diagrams of animal protection in Taiwan: The case of the stray animal policy.
Date Issued
2015
Date
2015
Author(s)
Lin, Huan-Chun
Abstract
In recent years, the concept of "" animal protection"" has attracted people in Taiwan, and thus compel the government to pay more attention to the animal protection related issues. Meanwhile, the concept of ""issue network,"" which emphasizes stakeholders tending to build up a complex and opened issue-centered network relationships, is emerging in political science literature. However, there were few examples that combine the concept of animal protection and issue network in previous studies. Moreover, the existing literature lacks the discussion of the whole picture of the actors and their interaction linkages. Therefore, this study adopts both questionnaire survey and in-depth interview, and uses the UCINET software to depict the network diagrams of different actors in various animal protection policy issues. Second, the study explains the actors'' attitudes toward different issues and the strong/weak ties among those actors via image and discourse analysis. By examining, their discourses and claims, this research further understands the roles, resources, relationships, and core values of the actors. The main research findings are as follows. First, the respondents/interviewees share a common view on four policy issues, but have different opinions on another four issues. Second, from the perspective of policy issues network, network diagrams change with different policy issues. Third, the composition of the actors in an issue network is not stable. Executive authorities and some specific animal protection groups have more resources and impacts. The degree of centrality and the indicator of betweenness are high. Fourth, the actors from different categories not only play different roles in different policy issues, but also grasp different resources and concern about different issues. At last, throughout the main discussion of animal protection, it can be found that most people concern about the policy issue of source management. This indicates that ""source management"" reaches the highest consensus among the actors in the field of animal protection. Regarding this, the government should make good use of this advantage to set up a platform for communication and coordination to build more consensuses among the actors. In addition, this study expects the combination of animal protection and the issue network approach can help improve the existing studies.
Subjects
Issue Network
Policy Network
Discourse Network Analysis
Animal Protection
Stray Animal Policy
UCInet.
Type
thesis
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