Between individualism and deliberation: rethinking discursive participation via social media

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to contribute to an improved understanding of citizen participation in public opinion formation on social media platforms. It seems questionable that the influential theory of deliberative democracy provides the best description for mutual citizen communication. Thus, this paper contrasts the deliberative model with the alternative approach of liberal individualism. Therefore, it operationalises distinctive criteria of both - deliberation and liberal individualism - for content analysis. Content analysis of two discussions via online readers' comments indicates a flexible and individual usage of such digital discussion platforms. Finally, based on empirical results, a typology of discursive participation is presented to provide an accurate basis for interpretation. This typology should help to overcome self-limitation of online deliberation research and to enable a more sophisticated understanding of discursive participation on social media platforms.