Deliberative Quality Research Articles

Assessment of Online Deliberative Quality: New Indicators Using Network Analysis and Time-Series Analysis

Online deliberation research has recently developed automated indicators to assess the deliberative quality of much user-generated online data. While most previous studies have developed indicators based on content analysis and network analysis, time-series data and associated methods have been studied less thoroughly. This article contributes to the literature by proposing indicators based on a combination of network analysis and time-series analysis, arguing that it will help monitor how online deliberation evolves. Based on Habermasian deliberative criteria, we develop six throughput indicators and demonstrate their applications in the OmaStadi participatory budgeting project in Helsinki, Finland. The study results show that these indicators consist of intuitive figures and visualizations that will facilitate collective intelligence on ongoing processes and ways to solve problems promptly.

Safe deliberative spaces online between refugee-claimants and the international community: Rohingya refugee use of Twitter for advocacy and deliberation

According to the United Nations, the world’s most discriminated-against population is the Rohingya, an ethnic Muslim minority from Myanmar who have been denied citizenship in their country. Today, they are largely displaced internally or residing in one of two camps in the region of Cox Bazar, Bangladesh. In order to advocate for their cause in terms of human rights and humanitarian needs, some Rohingya have turned to Twitter. This paper analyses tweets collected in August 2021 about the Rohingya cause, to understand the deliberative potential of this platform for refugee-claimants. It uses tweet metadata analysis, such as hashtag and mention analysis, along with LDA topic analysis, to analyse deliberative quality in the data. In this paper, we find that the tweets are mainly used for advocacy and have both low levels of polarisation and high levels of homogeneity. These findings diverge from analyses of other social media platforms, such as Facebook, which has been used partly for spreading hate-speech related to the Rohingya. We conclude that the Twitter platform is currently being used as an effective deliberative space between the Rohingya and the international humanitarian and human rights community, especially when it comes to advocacy.

Get lost, troll: How accusations of trolling in newspaper comment sections affect the debate

This qualitative study explores instances where someone is accused of being a troll or a bot in newspaper comment sections. Trolls have been known to create a hostile environment in comment sections, often motivated by attention seeking and amusement. In recent years, following the Brexit vote and the U.S. presidential election of 2016, trolls have also been accused of actively undermining the Western political climate by using social media to divide political opponents. Furthermore, technological development has led to the possibility of automated software, known as bots, playing a role in online debates. As social media users and participants of online comment sections become more digitally literate, the awareness of trolls and bots will hopefully make people less susceptible to online manipulation. But this awareness could also cause commenters to discredit and delegitimize opposing arguments in comment sections by accusing others of being a troll or a bot, without considering the merits of the argument itself. If this is the case, it constitutes a challenge in creating a democratically valuable debate in comment sections. In this study, comments from three U.S. news sites were sampled and analyzed to investigate how accusations of trolling are made, and how debates are affected by such accusations. The results showed that right-wing commenters were more likely to be accused of trolling, and that these accusations seem to have been motivated by political differences. Accusers would either challenge the suspected troll, critique the effectiveness of the perceived trolling, make fun of the suspected troll, or simply warn other commenters about their presence. Finally, while debates often continued after an accusation of trolling had been made, the accuser and the accused rarely participated further. The results suggest that accusations of trolling do not have any major impact on the debate. It is, however, problematic that such accusations seem to be used as a rhetorical tool to discredit opposing arguments, which could lower the deliberative quality of debates in comment sections.

Deliberation and Identity Rules: The Effect of Anonymity, Pseudonyms and Real-Name Requirements on the Cognitive Complexity of Online News Comments

How do identity rules influence online deliberation? We address this question by drawing on a data set of 45 million comments on news articles on the Huffington Post from January 2013 to May 2015. At the beginning of this period, the site allowed commenting under what we call non-durable pseudonyms. In December 2013, Huffington Post moved to regulate its forum by requiring users to authenticate their accounts. And in June 2014, Huffington Post outsourced commenting to Facebook altogether, approximating a ‘real-name’ environment. We find a significant increase in the cognitive complexity of comments (a proxy for one aspect of deliberative quality) during the middle phase, followed by a decrease following the shift to real-name commenting through Facebook. Our findings challenge the terms of the apparently simple trade-off between the goods and bads of anonymous and real-name environments and point to the potential value of durable pseudonymity in the context of online discussion.

Different Arenas, Different Deliberative Quality? Using a Systemic Framework to Evaluate Online Deliberation on Immigration Policy in Germany

One major strand of contemporary research on political participation addresses online deliberation. Over time, online deliberation has become increasingly pluralistic. Our study applies a framework derived from systemic deliberative theory to evaluate different online deliberation processes on German immigration policy. A crucial premise of the systemic deliberative theory is that the quality of deliberation varies systematically between different arenas within a political system. We differentiate between highly formal, semi‐formal, and informal deliberative arenas (arenas 1–3) and develop seven theory‐driven hypotheses concerning the quality of deliberative procedures in arenas 1–3 that we test through quantitative content analysis. Our study confirms the overarching expectation: processes’ deliberative quality varies systematically between arenas. The highest level of (aggregated) deliberative quality is displayed in arena 1—deliberations, that is, on the government‐run consultation platform. The more fine‐grained analysis of different dimensions of deliberative quality reveals that the patterns observed with regards to certain dimensions of deliberative quality (e.g., constructiveness and reciprocity) do not conform with our theory‐driven hypotheses. We discuss the theoretical and empirical implications of these findings. Future collaborations of theoretical and empirical scholars of deliberative democracy must address the specifics of online communication and the function of emotional communication in different deliberative arenas.

Debates electorales presidenciales bajo la mirada deliberativa. Caso México, 2012 y 2018

Los procesos electorales y sus prácticas asociadas de comunicación política representan elementos esenciales en regímenes democráticos. Propongo enriquecer la comprensión de campañas electorales a partir de la perspectiva deliberativa. La ventaja clave de una alta calidad deliberativa en campañas consiste en la posibilidad de contribuir al incremento de la racionalidad del voto, factor crucial en democracias incipientes. Este artículo expone el análisis y la evaluación del comportamiento discursivo y deliberativo de candidatos a la presidencia en seis debates en las elecciones federales mexicanas de 2012 y 2018.Para evaluar la calidad deliberativa en los debates, empleé elementos del Discourse Quality Index(DQI). Los resultados en la elección de 2012 muestran que, en contraste con los primeros dos debates efectuados bajo formatos tradicionales, el diseño del tercero (#YoSoy132) “forzó” a los candidatos a justificar sus posturas y relacionarse dialógicamente. Por su parte, en la elección de 2018, cuyos moderadores, auditorio y candidatos interactuaron de forma directa, se incrementó la calidad deliberativa en ciertos aspectos, aunque no necesariamente en el nivel argumentativo.

Mapping and Measuring Deliberation: Towards a New Deliberative Quality. By André Bächtiger and John Parkinson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. 208p. $78.00 cloth.

Mapping and Measuring Deliberation: Towards a New Deliberative Quality. By André Bächtiger and John Parkinson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. 208p. $78.00 cloth.

Deliberation and ecological democracy: from citizen to global system

ABSTRACTEcological democracy confronts a challenge of not only reconciling democracy and ecology, but doing so where human activities and their environmental consequences are increasingly global. Deliberative scholars dealing with these issues emphasise reflexive governance, involving the contestation of discourses, as part of the solution, mostly aimed at high-level institutions and intergovernmental cooperation. However, even at this level democracy demands responsiveness to the citizen. To this end, the paper explores citizen-level deliberation to inform possibilities for ecological democracy writ large, via a growing literature on deliberative governance and polycentrism. Different system levels are connected via ecologically reflexive capacity and the discursive conditions under which it is enhanced, including in small-scale minipublics. This understanding informs mechanisms for ‘scaling up’ deliberative quality to the wider public sphere via regulating the manipulation of public discourse. Minipublic deliberation, properly harnessed, can serve to decontaminate public debate of anti-reflexive strategic arguments and reshape public discourse. Such anti-reflexive strategies seek to shape the public will, specifically by de-emphasising ecology via intuitive arguments that short-cut public reasoning. Acting as discursive regulatory trustees, minipublics can improve reflexivity in the wider system via a nested polycentric approach that discursively connects citizens’ deliberation to the global system both horizontally and vertically.

Public Deliberation in Russia: Deliberative Quality, Rationality and Interactivity of the Online Media Discussions

Deliberation research is now undergoing two emerging trends: deliberation is shifting from offline to online, as well as from an inherently democratic concept to the one applicable to less competitive regimes (He & Warren, 2011). The goal of this article is to study the peculiarities of deliberative practices in hybrid regimes, taking online discourse on the Russian anti-sanctions policy as a case. We use the Habermasian concept of basic validity claims to assess deliberation quality through the lens of argumentation and interactivity. Our findings suggest that deliberative practices can exist in non-competitive contexts and non-institutionalized digital spaces, in the form of intersubjective solidarities resulting from the everyday political talk among ordinary citizens. Such deliberations can be counted as argumentative discourses, although in a special, casual way—unlike the procedural rule-based debates. Generally, as in established liberal democracies, deliberation in Russia tends to attract like-minded participants. While the argumentative quality does not seem to vary across the discussion threads sample, the level of deliberative interactivity is higher on pro-government media, accompanied with the higher level of incivility. On the other hand, discourses on independent media are distinctively against the government policy of food destruction. The democratic value of such deliberations is unclear and might depend on the political allegiance and ownership of the media. Though some discourses can be considered democratic, their impact on decision-making remains minimal, which is a key constraint of deliberation.

‘Let the Citizens Fix This Mess!’ Podemos’ Claim for Participatory Democracy in Spain

The declining trust in the representative institutions of liberal democracy after the 2008 economic crisis has generated a rise in appeals to substitute the representative model in favor of a participatory democracy. Although political representation has been in crisis since its very inception, for the first time the new technologies of communication based in the Web 2.0, smartphones and social media make replacing the elites’ intermediation in decision-making a real possibility. Aiming to critically address this issue, the article uses a political theory framework to analyze the role of political participation within the main models of democracy as a first step from where to question the viability and convenience of participatory democracy nowadays. Then, the article focuses on the case of Podemos in Spain, a left-wing populist party that advocates for instruments like referendums and citizen initiatives as a solution for the Spanish political crisis. Here, the article highlights the shortcomings of Podemos’s participatory proposal, mainly focused on aggregating predetermined positions instead of addressing the dynamics that undermine the quality of political debate. Finally, we conclude that dealing with the citizens’ political disaffection requires institutional innovations designed to increase the deliberative quality of our representative democracies.

El cherry-picking en los presupuestos participativos: un acercamiento a sus factores determinantes

Con las crisis de los actuales sistemas políticos, especialmente de la democracia representativa, el interés de la literatura académica se ha concentrado en nuevos instrumentos de participación ciudadana como los presupuestos participativos. Aunque este instrumento democrático ha sido estudiado sistemáticamente por numerosos autores, se sabe muy poco acerca del impacto de los presupuestos participativos en el ciclo de las políticas públicas. En otras palabras, aún se desconoce cuáles son los factores que determinan las trayectorias de las propuestas ciudadanas en la fase de implementación por los gobiernos locales. Para saldar este vacío teórico, el presente artículo aborda el estudio de algunas variables contextuales (tiempo electoral, violencia urbana, cantidad de propuestas y calidad deliberativa) y otras relativas a las propuestas (contenido, costo económico y costo político) que, se considera, determinan en última instancia la implementación, modificación o rechazo de las proposiciones ciudadanas. Se recurre principalmente a la literatura sobre presupuestos participativos y, de manera más amplia, sobre participación ciudadana y democracia participativa.

Commandeering the Institutions: The Legitimacy of Structural Judicial Remedies in Comparative Perspective

Abstract In some countries, courts protect constitutional rights by ordering broad institutional reforms and overseeing those reforms. These broad orders are known as structural remedies, and they are currently part of the judicial practice of the United States, India, and Colombia. Structural remedies pose a problem of democratic legitimacy in that courts substitute for legislatures or administrators. This paper argues that structural remedies are democratically legitimate as long as they are used as a last resort and are aimed at addressing a specific institutional pathology within the legislature or the bureaucracy. Drawing from the experience of the United States, India, and Colombia, the paper distinguishes counter-legislative from counter-bureaucratic remedies in order to show that the democratic concerns raised may vary depending on the affected institution. The paper argues that structural remedies are legitimate if they are capable of correcting a pathology in the legislative or administrative process. With respect to legislatures, structural remedies should aim at improving the representative or the deliberative quality of legislative decisions. In the case of bureaucracies, they should aim at improving the subordination of agencies to the political process, their responsiveness to citizens’ concerns, and the expertise with which their tasks are carried out.

Deliberation and Complexity of Thinking. Using the Integrative Complexity Scale to Assess the Deliberative Quality of Minipublics

AbstractThe quality of deliberative conversations are dependent on citizens compliance with deliberative norms yet there is a lack of methods to assess norm compliance in discussions. Here, the psychological construct of complexity of thinking is claimed to conceptually correspond to the deliberative conversational ideal and adopted as a measurement of deliberative norm compliance. The hypothesis that citizens' complexity of thinking increases as a result of participation in deliberative conversations was tested in a minipublic case study in Sweden. Participants' complexity of thinking was assessed before and after deliberation by responding to an open‐ended question about the topic of debate. Manual coding was used to rate participants integrative complexity. The result confirms the hypothesis, which serves as an indicator of deliberative quality. The study also demonstrates that women get higher increases in complexity, as do highly agreeable individuals and those who hold more liberal views. The findings demonstrate the potential usefulness of integrative complexity as a measurement of deliberative quality.

Deliberation, demobilization, and limited empowerment: a survey study on participatory pricing in China

AbstractAuthoritarian deliberation has been used widely to describe the specific form of deliberation developed in China. However, whether its practice will strengthen authoritarianism or lead to democratization remains unknown. In this study, we examine this question from the perspective of participants in public deliberation. Surveying the participants in participatory pricings held in Shanghai over the past 5 years, we find that participants’ perception of deliberative quality has a statistically significant negative impact on their level of political activism, while their level of empowerment has a moderating effect on this negative relationship. In this light, Chinese deliberative practices characterized by high-quality deliberation and low-level empowerment are likely to have a demobilization effect; thus, they reinforce the authoritarian rules.

Linking News Value Theory With Online Deliberation: How News Factors and Illustration Factors in News Articles Affect the Deliberative Quality of User Discussions in SNS’ Comment Sections

Previous research suggests that distinct characteristics of news articles, such as their news factors, account for the different participation rates in comment sections as well as the degree of interactivity among the discussants. In this study, this assumption is tested in the Facebook environment and extended to the analysis of how news factors (i.e., event characteristics) and illustration factors (i.e., characteristics resulting from a specific journalistic editing) of news articles predict the inclusiveness of discussions, as well as the occurrence of civility, rationality, and deliberative interactivity in user comments. A content analysis of 619 news articles and 11,218 related user comments on nine nation-wide Facebook news pages reveals that the news factors controversy, latent conflict, contravention, obtrusiveness, and impact particularly account for specific discussion qualities. The results also show that the illustration factors emotional language/ visualizations, slant, and conversational prompts affect the deliberative quality of the discussions.

De interactielogica van verzet: een dramaturgische analyse van escalatie tijdens een informatieavond

Theory about participation has long moved beyond merely informing citizens, arguing for more influential and effective instruments. Nevertheless, ‘inspraak’ remains widely implemented in Dutch practice, with mixed results. This article argues that the deliberative quality of the instrument is closely related to the performance of power. Dramaturgical concepts are employed to analyze resistance against the siting of a homeless facility in an Amsterdam neighborhood. One particular evening sets the stage for escalation, which ultimately frustrates the policy process. The analysis shows how the performance of the meeting invokes specific kinds of resistance. A different performance of ‘informing’ could potentially improve the quality of the public sphere.

Using a deliberative forum for engaging health system and health plan leaders to prioritize research topics

Background: Including stakeholders in the process and outcomes of comparative effectiveness research (CER) can help ensure that research questions are relevant and findings are communicated to individuals who need them for decision-making. Yet limited strategies are available to assist researchers with stakeholder engagement.While health system leaders’ perspectives are increasingly recognized as valuable for CER planning, their inclusion in the stakeholder pool raises challenges due to differences in culture, training, incentives, priorities and language norms.Objective: To convene and evaluate a deliberative forum for engaging health system leaders and other stakeholders in order to shape health system research priorities for the PaTH Clinical Data Research Network, a member of the National Patient-Centered Clinical Research Network (PCORnet).Methods: Breakout sessions and large group deliberation solicited diverse perspectives and explored benefits and challenges of different research questions. Topic reframing, narrative integration and dynamic updating techniques facilitated communication across diverse backgrounds. Participants included 29 health system and health plan leaders, clinicians, clinical researchers and patients from the network’s 6 participating health systems. Main measures were audience response system (ARS) polling on general topic preferences and survey data on measures of engagement and deliberation success.Results: A slate of 10 specific research topics was vetted; after deliberation, the group converged to favor the characterization of high utilizers of healthcare. Audience response polling revealed opinion shifts. Participants reported high levels of satisfaction with the experience and rated it highly for markers of deliberative quality (e.g., opportunity for active participation and adequate discussion, respect for others’ opinions and awareness of different perspectives). Fifty-four percent noted their views on the issues changed. Most participants learned from the experience (93%) and agreed that the process helped them to empathize with the challenges of others (85%).Conclusions: A deliberation forum can incorporate diverse stakeholders into CER, enabling participants to inform and learn from each other’s perspectives while shaping a person-centered research trajectory.

Letting the faculty deliberate: analyzing online deliberation in academia using a comprehensive approach

ABSTRACTWhile the scholarship on online deliberation has recently witnessed remarkable growth, most studies have focused on different parts of deliberation, thus neglecting other parts of the theorized process. This paper presents a case study of online deliberation in academia using a framework including three analytical parts: a design fostering deliberation (institutional inputs), the quality of the communication process (communicative throughput), and the expected benefits of deliberation (productive outcomes). Each level addressed in the framework is both rooted in deliberative theory and complemented by empirical findings. Applying the framework to a case study on online deliberation about new PhD guidelines in a German science faculty demonstrates that the framework is viable for empirical research. In analyzing 435 comments and an online survey completed by 230 participants, the case study reveals that if deliberative standards at the institutional input level are met there is considerable deliberative quality at the level of communicative throughput, and expected outcomes could thus emerge. This example makes a case for further online deliberation initiatives in similar contexts such as parties or organizations that must decide on important issues or legally binding norms.

Deliberation in Multi-Stakeholder Participation: A Heuristic Framework Applied to the Committee on World Food Security

Multi-stakeholder participation (MSP) has become a central feature in several institutions and processes of global governance. Those who promote them trust that these arrangements can advance the deliberative quality of international institutions, and thereby improve the democratic quality, legitimacy and effectiveness of both the institutional landscape, as well as decisions made within it. This paper employs a heuristic framework to analyze the deliberative quality of MSP. Specifically, it applies Dryzek’s deliberative systems framework to the case of the Committee on World Food Security (CFS). The assessment shows that the CFS improves the deliberative quality of food security governance by including and facilitating the transmission of discourses from the public to the empowered spaces. However, the deliberative quality of CFS could be higher with stronger accountability mechanisms in place, more meta-deliberation and adoption of CFS outcomes at national and local levels. Reflecting on the limitations of using this heuristic framework to assess MSP, we conclude that the analysis would benefit from more explicit consideration of different forms of power that are part of the social relations between actors involved in such settings. By proposing this analytical approach, we expect to advance a heuristic framework for assessing deliberation in an international context of the growing importance of MSP in sustainability and global governance.

Revisiting the democratic promise of participatory budgeting in light of competing political, good governance and technocratic logics

Participatory budgeting (PB) has been a major innovation in participatory governance worldwide, with more than 3,000 experiences listed across 40 countries. PB has also diversified over its 30 years, with many contemporary experiments (referred to as PBs) only tangentially related to the original project to “radically democratize democracy”. We propose a taxonomy to distinguish the logics currently underpinning PB in practice: political (for radical democratic change), good governance (to improve links between the public and citizens’ spheres), and technocratic (to optimize the use and transparency of public resources for citizens’ benefit). Illustrating these competing rationales through contemporary experiences, we reflect on the contributions of the good governance and technocratic frameworks to managerial and state modernization. Undoubtedly, these help explain PB’s growing attraction for proponents of the good governance agenda. However, rekindling PB’s promise for democratic deepening, we argue, requires refocusing on its deliberative quality. We draw attention to civic education and empowerment of participants as key components of PB practices intent on opening pathways towards alternative political systems – indeed, of materializing Henri Lefebvre’s “right to the city”.