Abstract
Does information improve deliberation? Proponents of online deliberation argue that the availability of the Internet can solve two longstanding problems of citizen decisionmaking: that preexisting inequalities tend to be reproduced rather than minimized in deliberative forums and that citizen decisionmaking sacrifices the benefits of expertise. Because all deliberators online can access information during their discussion, deliberation should be more informed and more equal. We put those claims to the test by analyzing URL-link posting in an online deliberative forum composed of 25 deliberating groups. On the positive side of the ledger, we show that participants did take advantage of the informational capacities of the web. URL-link posting not only generated more interaction than did opinions posted without links but it also responded to what we call the scale and uptake problems of public deliberation. On the negative side of the ledger, far from equalizing deliberation, the availability of online information may have given additional advantages to already advantaged groups. This was true even in groups that were actively facilitated. The availability of online information may also have fostered discussions, in some instances, that were more opinionated than informed. Information in the Internet age is newly accessible, we conclude, but is also politicized in unfamiliar ways.
Highlights
Can radically democratic decisions be intelligent ones? Critics since Aristotle have worried that giving power to the people sacrifices the benefits of expertise
As part of a broader effort to understand just what transpires in public deliberation (Ryfe 2005; Stromer-Galley 2005), we analyze one kind of information sharing in an online deliberative forum: the posting of URL links. This is a still relatively uncommon form of information exchange. It is both distinctive to the Internet—and at the cutting edge of the Internet’s capacities in this regard—and lends itself to the kind of empirical analysis that has been difficult with other forms of information-sharing
Contrary to the third assumption, that the information available over the Internet is transparent enough in its political orientations as not to bias discussions, we found that political orientations were concealed in Internet sites that presented themselves as politically neutral
Summary
Listening to the City Online was convened in the summer of 2002 to solicit public input into the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site in the wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack. What we call facilitated groups, by contrast, had one or two facilitators, who were an active presence: encouraging participants’ input; responding to and summarizing participants’ responses; helping to solve technical problems; and providing information on the dialogues and the substantive issues that came up in them (Trenel forthcoming). These did not reveal any significant differences, leading us to believe that the sample is representative of opinion-posters This allows us to compare the conditions in which people posted and responded to reasoned opinions and messages containing URL links. To investigate whether the information online deliberators brought to bear was unacknowledgedly partisan, we coded the content of the webpages to which people posted links These included newspaper or magazine articles; editorials; governmental agencies; other threads in the forum; advocacy groups; or sites devoted to architecture, design, or planning. Argumentative messages supported or criticized a position, either that of the poster or that of someone else; and mobilizing messages sought to connect deliberators with groups mobilizing outside the forum
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