No abstract

Online discussions between citizens have been subject to scholarly debate and several empirical studies for a substantial period of time. Scholars have envisioned these as potential venues for citizens' deliberation. Often, however, empirical findings do not support these notions. The quality of discussion is often not up to the standards of truly deliberative discussions. Nonetheless, there are strains of evidence suggesting that online discussion venues applying facilitators, fixed topics and actively enforcing discussion rules, may avoid many of the problems with discussion quality. This article therefore examines whether readers' comments on a Finnish newspaper's website resemble democratic conversations. During the course of three weeks in spring 2010, we content analyze 300 reader comments. Our findings indicate that although there are strains of democratic conversations to be found in online reader comments, there are also many instances in which the opposite holds true.

This paper analyzes anonymous political participation in the form of e-petition signing. The purpose of this study is to increase knowledge about patterns behind anonymous e-petition signing. Since online political participation evokes an important discussion about the balance between the need for transparency on the one hand, and the right for anonymity on the other hand, it is crucial to increase our knowledge of the factors affecting citizens’ choices to remain anonymous. Using quantitative content analysis of 220 informal e-petitions on the site adressit.com in Finland, this study seeks to find possible determinants for the share of anonymous signatures. Findings indicate that the type of demand presented in the e-petition is a key factor predicting the share of anonymous signatures.

This article reports on deliberation between citizens and politicians in a citizens’ forum about closing small schools and building a school center in a Finnish municipality. This real-world policy issue was highly contested at the time of the deliberation. The purpose of the study was to analyze both the magnitude of opinion changes and potential opinion convergence between citizens and politicians. The citizens’ forum used an experimental design whereby half of the groups engaged in discussion under the guidance of a facilitator with discussion rules, and the other half of the groups had no facilitation or rules. The analyses test how potential opinion changes are mediated by how deliberators experience discussion quality and moderated by the type of participant (citizen or politician). The findings show that opinion changes, both regarding magnitude and convergence, are not uniform for politicians and citizens. Moreover, this study shows how different layers of opinions may be affected differently by deliberation.

There is a perception that citizen deliberation brings about higher-quality discussions than discussions where deliberative norms are not used. Often, deliberations are realised in mini-publics in which certain contextual features ensure, a priori, that the discussions are likely to be of a high quality. However, few studies have as yet explored the boundaries of deliberation; that is, contemplated what happens to discussion quality if the ideal-speech situation is strayed away from. To address this point, this article reports on an online experiment in which the discursive setting of citizen deliberations is manipulated. The experiment (n = 50 participants) was carried out online in Finland in November 2013 in order to test the impact on discussion quality related to two factors: the temporality (asynchronous or synchronous discussions) and identifiability of participants (known or anonymous) in an online deliberation. The findings clearly indicate that asynchronous discussions have the most positive influence on discussion quality. Moreover, the identifiability factor only had a small weak influence on discussion quality, and there was only one weak interaction effect between the two factors.