The practice of political deliberation on the Internet is not static but has its own
dynamics that can lead to deliberative ideals. The current state of online political
discussions is not as ideal as normative theories envisioned; however, it might approach
those ideals through durable communications. Merely evaluating the aggregate state is
insufficient to understand the present nature and possible future of online discussions.
The current study conceives online political discussions as an autonomous and selforganized
system in which discussion atmosphere (i.e., opinion climate, opinion
heterogeneity, and cross-cutting debate) plays an important role in recruiting discussants,
organizing conversations, and producing common ground. Instead of comparing the state
of deliberation practice with normative ideals, the study evaluates the democratic
potential of online political discussions through exploring whether the self-organized
system is driven by the mechanisms of interpersonal communication towards political
deliberativeness. In particular, the study asks whether the existence of diverse opinions in
discussions can foster durable political deliberation, whether cross-cutting debate is an
independent organizational rule of online political discussions, and whether online
discussions produces common ground for further deliberation.
In doing so, two data sets were collected from web discussion forums. The first
dataset consists of 329 political discussion threads (comprising 5,358 messages)
randomly sampled from five popular discussion forums in the United States. The second
dataset consists of 2,372 discussions threads (totaling 175,960 messages) that populate
the discussion threads about 2012 U.S. presidential election on debatepolitics.com. The
first dataset is used to answer more general questions, while the second dataset is used to answer the questions that require complete network information. This study combines
human coding content analysis and computer-assisted text mining techniques, with the
resulting data analyzed by event history models and longitudinal social network models
to examine the dynamic role of discussion atmosphere in the process of forum
discussions. Following the literature on political conversation, a complete process of
political deliberation is composed of three moments: recruitment (the context and
likelihood of participating in online political discussions), organization (how users
communicate with each other and to what extent online discussions satisfy deliberative
requirements), and production (the impacts of political discussions on deliberative
outcomes).
In the recruitment moment, discussion atmosphere serves as a criterion for
collaborative filtering of homogenous discussions in web forums. Discussion threads
including heterogeneous opinions and a high proportion of cross-cutting debates are more
likely to attract further replies. Opinion climate functions as the basic environmental cue
for user expression of agreement or disagreement. Generally, users are more inclined to
reply when the opinion climate is congruent with their own. Concurrently, opinion
heterogeneity attenuates the tendency of congruent expression and prevents durable
conversations from moving towards the dominance of a single opinion. Furthermore,
cross-cutting debates increase the expression of neutral replies, implying a process of
moderation.
At the organization moment, discussion atmosphere functions as a basic rule of
organizing forum discussions in addition to purely structural mechanisms (e.g.,
reciprocity, transitivity, and popularity effect), conversational norms, and common interest. Forum users are more likely to discuss with politically dissimilar ones. Crosscutting
debates, in this study, appear to be a unique principle of forming discussion
networks. In this process, congruent expression exerts its influence in two ways: First,
messages containing incongruent opinions are less likely to be posted and, if posted,
replied to by other users. Second, a congruent opinion climate is likely to promote users
to engage with users who are not like-minded.
In the production moment, users who send more cross-cutting messages are more
inclined to participate in future discussions, whereas those who receive more crosscutting
messages are less likely to participate in the future. The results also suggest that
threads with a greater proportion of cross-cutting debates are less cohesive in term of
network structure than those with more intra-ideological discussions. Finally, the
semantic similarity increases and a cohesive interpretive framework emerge over a
sufficient long period of discussions.
In addition to examining the process separately at each key moment of forum
political discussions, the study suggests the existence of a coevolution process between
discussion organization and production at the individual level. Political debates could
produce commonly acceptable interpretive frameworks which would further facilitate
communication among the participants.
The study makes several contributions, both empirical and theoretical, to the
knowledge of political deliberation. First, the study underscores the role of interpersonal
communication mechanisms in structuring online political discussions, which has largely
been neglected in previous studies. Second, the study shows that discussion atmosphere
as a coevolving contextual factor plays an important role in the process of political discussions. A set of controversial measures of contextual factors in previous studies is
summarized, re-conceptualized, and carefully operationalized in the context of web-based
forum discussions. Third, the dynamics of seeking and producing commonality are
examined for the first time by using text mining techniques in a large discourse dataset.
Fourth, the study suggests an alternative explanation for the long-standing debate
concerning the impact of cross-cutting debates on political participation. Actively
sending cross-cutting messages could foster participation, whereas passively receiving
cross-cutting messages might thwart further participation. Finally, this study proposes a
novel perspective to evaluate the potential of online political discussions for deliberative
democracy in a dynamic way.
| Date of Award | 15 Jul 2014 |
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| Original language | English |
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| Awarding Institution | - City University of Hong Kong
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| Supervisor | Jian Hua Jonathan ZHU (Supervisor) |
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