Assessing some measures of online deliberation

Abstract

The empirical turn in deliberative democracy has fostered the development of different methodological procedures. Within this literature, studies focusing on the internet have gained increasing attention. The belief that the internet may help solve some of the deliberative deficits of democracies has propelled an interest in the potential benefits and problems of online discourse. This article seeks to discuss some of the methods that have been advocated for the study of online deliberation to point out three of their weaknesses: (01) the establishment of misleading distinctions; (02) the neglect of the implications of the deliberative system; and (03) the disregard of some specificities of the internet. This turn has fostered the development of methods applicable to different types of discursive arenas aimed at tackling diverse problems (BLACK et al., 2009;DRYZEK, 2008). Most studies seek to assess either the deliberativeness of specific types of interaction (KELLY, 2008;STEINER et al., 2004;WESSLER, 2008) Keywords T Ricardo Fabrino Mendonça 90(2015) 9 (3) 88 -115 in the empirical literature on deliberative democracy in general, while other issues are specific to texts related to the online phenomena.This article begins with a very brief review of online deliberation, followed by the presentation of some analytical approaches utilized to study this topic. The following sections provide a discussion of three weaknesses of the previous approaches to online deliberation: (01) the establishment of misleading distinctions, (02) the neglect of the implications of the deliberative system, and (03) the disregard of some specificities of the internet. It must be clear that it is not my aim, in this article, to advocate deliberative democracy against its critics or to deal with the many relevant criticisms raised against this democratic perspective. There is an extensive literature covering this debate 3 . My goal is to foster the advancement of a debate within the deliberative approach, contributing to the development of this literature in its own grounds. Online deliberation and its measuresOnline deliberation is one of the main areas of interest among the most innovative research on deliberative democracy . Following the excitement evident in studies from the early 1990s that anticipated the emergence of a new public sphere on the internet, and on a more critical perspective, several scholars have tried to understand online practices by examining them through the lens of deliberation 4 .Briefly, deliberation has been understood as a process reflecting a publicgive-and-take of reasons marked by the equality of its participants. Deliberation is a dialogical practice during which social actors seek to convince each other through a discursive exchange. Based on the Habermasian theory, this idea was developed

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