Citizen Scoring Before Deployment: The Social Construction of Vietnam's Digital Citizen Point System

This thesis examines how the meaning of a proposed digital governance technology is constructed and contested before that technology is deployed. The case study is Vietnam's proposed Digital Citizen Point System (Hệ thống Điểm công dân số), a tiered scoring mechanism set out in the Draft Resolution on Digital Citizen Development (Dự thảo Nghị quyết về phát triển công dân số) prepared by the Ministry of Public Security under Đề án 06 (Project 06) and opened for public consultation from 12 to 31 December 2025. The system proposes to score citizens through the VNeID national digital identity application across four behavioral domains and placing them into one of three tiers (Tích cực (Active), Cơ bản (Basic), Chưa xếp hạng (Unranked)) and distribute tax and administrative-fee incentives accordingly. Studying the system at this pre-implementation stage is theoretically valuable because the artifact has not yet been deployed, interpretive flexibility is at its peak and the discursive contest over its meaning can be observed in real time. The thesis is grounded in Science and Technology Studies. Wyatt's framework of justificatory technological determinism and Pinch and Bijker's Social Construction of Technology are combined with the sociology of expectations to analyze an artifact that at the time of writing, exists only as discourse. Framing analysis (Entman), agenda-setting (McCombs & Shaw), and gamification theory (Deterding et al.) provide the analytical tools. The empirical analysis is divided into two strands. Strand A applies framing and salience analysis to 39 state and media documents from the consultation period and its immediate aftermath, including the draft resolution, ministry communications, and coverage by five Vietnamese outlets stratified by institutional position. Strand B applies thematic and sentiment analysis to a corpus of 528 Facebook comments drawn from 13 public posts during the same period. Together the two strands trace the state's attempt at rhetorical closure through coordinated framing, justificatory architecture, a pre-emptive disclaimer distributed across official documents, and test whether that closure holds once it reaches the algorithmically curated Vietnamese-language public sphere.