Operationalizing deliberation (2)

Just a quick note.

For our research seminar, I finally put together a paper containing what hopefully will remain as basic pillars of my conceptualization and operationalization of deliberation. I start from a basic definition, review some existing conceptual approaches and coding schemes, and finally arrive at the conclusions that

a.) Deliberaton can mean any number of things, and so in order to analyze it, its context must be considered, and

b.) in the specific context that I’m examining deliberation (in the discussions on social news sites about the 2008 US presidential election), discussions should meet the following criteria in order to qualify as such:

• exposure of heterogeneous views;
• external openness (accessability);
• internal openness (equal communicative rights);
• argumentativeness (the use of rational and relevant arguments);
• reciprocity, and
• reflexivity.

More on this coding scheme later; say, after our seminar discussion.

Operationalizing deliberation

I’ve been, for some time, working on conceptualizing and operationalizing “deliberation” – after all, this is what I’ll look for in analysing the discussions on social news websites.

Janssen and Kies (2005) offer a comprehensive rundown on previous attempts at pinning down what deliberation is. Steenbergen et al. (2003) go so far as creating a “Discourse Quality Index” to measure political deliberation; and both papers are openly endorsed by Habermas (2005) himself. What is interesting is that, although it has been noted (by Bohman, Mutz, Sunstein and others) that the presence of conflicting views, the clashing of opinions is an essential part of deliberation, the presence or absence of contradicting arguments does not feature any of the operationalization attempts mentioned in these papers.

How come?

AR; Against Deliberation

…so is the title of an essay by Lynn M. Sanders, originally published in 1997 in Political Theory. (No link this time.) What is this about?

Well, deliberation, says Sanders, is perhaps too often regarded as some kind of panacea for the problems of democracies. An overly enthusiastic belief in the powers of deliberation overlooks its perceived problems: most importantly, that its prerequisites might easily exclude the disenfranchised from taking part – which is all the more dangerous since it is claimed that deliberation will eliminate such problems of political discussion.

Sanders illustrates the problem through the example of US juries: for example, how those of higher socio-economic status tend to be perceived as having better arguments than others.

So, on the one hand, deliberation, in theory, might not be so open as it is claimed; and on the other hand, in practice, as it is empirically shown, doesn’t produce the results that it is expected to produce.

What, then, should be the solution? Well, according to the radical view of Sanders, alternative forms of political participation should be sought; and one candidate of that would be the form of “testimony“: a personal, experiential, not-necessarily-rational account of things as they are and as they should be.

There are five points I’d like to make about this argument.

AR; political discussion frequency, network size, and heterogeneity of discussions

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Not one of the snappiest titles ever, but the original – from William P. Eveland, Jr. and Myiah Hutchens Hively, is even longer. In their paper they have reviewed considerable amounts of previous research material on political discussion, and on this basis arrived at more accurate and hence more useful conceptualization of notions such as “discussion frequency”, “safe” and “dangerous” discussion, and “heterogeneity” of political discussion.

Finally, they examined how these affect political knowledge (also reconceptualized here), and political participation, through a new survey.

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AR; A new(s) sort of democracy?

I started to read Ewan Crawford’s article on the opinion pages in the Scottish quailty dailies in the hope that it would supply some more tips on how to understand, conceptualize and operationalize deliberation – but in this regard I wasn’t really satisfied.

The paper recounts results of a content analysis of two Scottish “broadsheet” daily newspapers, trying to answer the question – to what extent do these contribute deliberative democracy.

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Correspondence – reflections on Dimitra Milioni’s article

What follows below is some reflections on Dimitra L. Milioni’s recent article “Probing the online counterpublic sphere: the case of Indymedia Athens”, published in Media, Culture & Society.

It’s long(ish). You’ve been warned.

AR; political discussion in a democratizing society

Related to yesterday’s article review, here’s another one, this time from Communication Research. Francis L.F. Lee From the Chinese University of Hong Kong looked at the problem of political discussion in a democratizing (=not-yet, or not-fully democratic) society.

The conclusion in a nutshell: discussion and exposure to disagreement both are very important for deliberatively democratizing societies – but they are not the only factors that matter in the quality of deliberation. At the same time, support for democracy does not in itself emerge as a precondition for deliberation.

About rational argument

The often-mentioned second phase of my research is about understanding whether or not deliberation happens on social news sites, and whether it has anything to do with how the front page of the sites will end up looking like.

So one of the tasks of the moment is to find a way to conceptualize deliberation, and to put it into the context that is provided by Habermas, and his various critics, such as Mouffe, about the role of rational argumentation in democracy.

This lead me to pick up Stanley S. Kleinberg’s book “Politics & Philosophy: The necessity and limitations of rational argument.” It did not turn out to be helpful in the conceptualization of deliberation, or understanding what “good argument” was, but on the other hand, it is a very interesting philosophical account of a line of thought about the role of rational argument in general.

I try to summarize this line of thought here.

AR: Online vs face-to-face deliberation: effects on civic engagement

Seong-Jae Min’s article, published in the JCMC (Vol. 12. (2007), pp1369-1387), is quite about what you would expect from the title; it compares online to face-to-face deliberation in an experimental setting. It concludes saying that “online deliberation is not necessarily inferior to face-to-face deliberation,” and that “both online and face-to-face deliberation can increase participants’ issue knowledge, political efficacy and willingness to participate in politics.”

In the experiment, one group of participants (divided into smaller groups) deliberated offline, in face-to-face conversation, while another group (also divided into smaller groups) did the same online, in chatrooms set up especially for the occasion. Both groups discussed the same topic; in fact, all factors affecting the deliberation were the same for them, except that communication in the latter group took place online (but the group members were actually sitting in the same computer lab, albeit without being able to see each other).

I’d like to make two quick points about the experiment and its results.

AR: Whose voice is heard in online deliberation?

Some quick notes on Steffen Albrecht’s paper “Whose voice is heard in online deliberation? – A study of participation and representation in political debates on the Internet.” (Information, Communication & Society, Vol. 9. No 1., February 2006)

Albrecht discusses topics such as political activism online (does the net actually spread activism?; not really, though it provides new forms for it), the situational advantage of the digerati, and hypotheses about the lack of social cues (unreliability vs the levelling out effect). The paper then approaches the main problem through a case study carried out in Hamburg in November 2002.

But what’s most important is not really the answer to the question in the title – the point is that the answer is quite vague, and it is most useful if we look at it as an incentive to ask further questions. As the main concluding point, Albrecht proposes a new theoretical model to conduct research into online deliberation; in the model, four sets of factors are considered to determine who participates (participation) and what is communicated (representation) in instances of online deliberation.