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; 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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A new paper

I have compiled a short paper venturing into the content and source analysis of social news websites – you can find it on the “Papers” section of this blog. I plan to present the paper at the 2009 Conference on New Media and Information in Athens. Abiding by the regulations set by the organizing committee of the conference, I had to shorten the paper considerably, which meant the omission of some, probably important, but at least interesting, topics.

For example, I could not present the findings about the perceived bias of Digg, Reddit and Newsvine (or their respective communities). Even though the reliability of this study of bias was quite low (Krippendorff’s alpha between 0.45 and 0.6 for the tested variables), I still think it has some important findings, so I plan to write a shorter post about it (if you’re familiar with these sites, it probably won’t come as a surprise to know that considerable degree of pro-Obama and contra-McCain bias could be observed).

Apart from that, I’m starting to read the book “Hearing the Other Side – Deliberative versus Participatory Democracy” by Diana C. Mutz – there is always new things to add to the theoretical background of the whole study it seems.