Online Deliberation in Academia: Evaluating the Quality and Legitimacy of Cooperatively Developed University Regulations

Abstract

This article focuses on the potential of online participation to enable the cooperative development of norms by affected stakeholders, investigating whether such processes can produce norms of both high quality and legitimacy. To answer this question, we designed, implemented, and evaluated an online norm setting process that goes beyond the scope of those usually described in the literature. Taking as a case study a process to redraft the examination regulations for doctoral degrees at a science faculty of a German university, we show that such instances of online deliberation can integrate the diversity of opinions of all affected stakeholders. The result was a norm that implemented previously controversial external recommendations for doctoral dissertation procedures and that was met with high satisfaction from both those who participated as well as those who remained passive. While we believe that the university context in which this process was conducted is particularly promising for such efforts because of its organization, its members, and the issue that was at stake, we argue that similar conducive conditions exist, for example, for political parties. As such, the findings can be instructive for understanding the potential and limits of successful online participation in other contexts.

What to Do with an Airport? Mining Arguments in the German Online Participation Project Tempelhofer Feld

“…how it can beautify a park). Aside from politics, companies or institutions can use online participation for policy drafting, for example, in universities (Escher et al, 2016).…”

BRAT Rapid Annotation Tool

“…In diesen Dateien werden die Annotationen später abgespeichert und für die Analyse dokumentiert. (Esau, 2018(Esau, , 2022Esau & Friess, 2022) sowie einer interdisziplinären Zusammenarbeit zwischen den Instituten Infor matik und Sozialwissenschaften (Escher et al, 2016;Liebeck et al, 2016Liebeck et al, , 2017. Ursprünglich war geplant, weitere Konstrukte in BRAT zu annotieren und dafür auch komplexere Annotationsformen zu nutzen.…”

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

“…Traditionally, empirical studies select some of the theory-based criteria using coding schemes and then hire trained coders to assess deliberative quality [35][36][37][38][39][40][41]58,63,64]. For instance, Esau et al [35] developed eight quality measures, and five coders assessed the quality of textual contents by reading a sample of user comments on several online platforms.…”

“…Existing studies have proposed a wide range of normative criteria, such as respect and accessibility, to assess how public deliberation should be conducted [27]. Based on a set of theory-based criteria, most deliberative quality indicators require trained coders to read and assess the quality of the contents of the deliberation [35][36][37][38][39][40][41]. This method is useful for detailed assessment, but it requires significant resources in terms of coders and time [42,43].…”