Promises and limits of Web-deliberation

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Promises and Limits of Web-deliberation

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Raphaël Kies

promises and limits of web-deliberation

Copyright © Raphaël Kies, 2010. All rights reserved. First published in 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States – a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–61921–0 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kies, Raphaël. Promises and limits of Web-deliberation / Raphaël Kies. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978–0–230–61921–0 (alk. paper) 1. Political participation–Computer network resources–United States. 2. Political participation–Computer network resources–European Union countries. 3. Deliberative democracy–United States. 4. Deliberative democracy–European Union countries. 5. Social media–United States. 6. Social media–European Union countries. 7. Internet–Political aspects. I. Title. JK1764.K54 2010 323'.04202854678-dc22 2009031181 A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by MPS Limited, A Macmillan Company First edition: April 2010 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

Contents List of Tables

vii

List of Figures

ix

Foreword

xi

Introduction

1

1

2

Deliberative Democracy: Origins, Meaning, and Major Controversies 1.1 The Public Sphere, Its Origins, and Decline 1.2 Defining Deliberative Democracy 1.3 Deliberative Democracy and Its Feasibility 1.4 Concluding Remarks

7 8 21 32 37

Deliberative Democracy and Its Operationalization 2.1 Deliberative Criteria and Their Operationalization 2.2 Models of Deliberative Democracy and Their Methodological Implications 2.3 Concluding Remarks

39 40

3

Extension of Online Political Debates 3.1 Web-discussion Usage 3.2 Online Discursive Offer 3.3 Summary and Concluding Remarks

65 66 72 91

4

Existing Findings on the Deliberativeness of the Web Debates 95 4.1 Method of Analysis 96 4.2 Findings 100 4.3 Concluding Remarks 114

5

Analysis of the Forum of the Radicali Italiani 5.1 Methodology 5.2 General Characteristics of the Forum 5.3 Analysis of Forum Participation 5.4 Profile of Users

57 62

117 118 120 124 127

vi

Contents

5.5 5.6 5.7 6

The Forum and Its Functions Deliberativeness of the Radical Forum Concluding Remarks

Online Campaign and Voting in Issy-les-Moulineaux 6.1 District Councils: Functioning and Voting Results 6.2 People Involved in the Campaign: Candidates versus Noncandidates 6.3 Dynamic of the Campaign 6.4 Deliberativeness of the Campaign Debates 6.5 Concluding Remarks

130 136 141 143 144 147 150 153 161

Conclusion

163

Notes

167

References

177

Index

183

List of Tables 1.1

Deliberative versus republican and liberal models of democracy

24

1.2

Deliberative versus aggregative model of democracy

30

2.1

Deliberative criteria and their meanings

42

2.2

Deliberative criteria and their operationalization

56

3.1

Political involvement of European young citizens

70

3.2

Online interactive supply in U.S. and EU cities

83

3.3

Comparative analysis of national political parties’ Web-forum offer in the EU

90

4.1

Ten studies on deliberativeness of online debates

101

6.1

Level of reciprocity in electoral blogs of districts one and four

158

Level of justification and external impact in electoral blogs of districts one and four

160

6.2


List of Figures 3.1 Online interactive supply of national parliaments of 25 EU member states and of European Parliament

77

3.2 Interactive supply of EU national political parties and European political parties

88

5.1 Evolution in time of the participation at the Radicali Italiani forum

125

5.2 Reasons for using the Radicali Italiani forum

131

6.1 Dynamic of debates in electoral blog of Issy-les-Moulineaux

151


Foreword

This book is the completion of a reflection that I started at the end of the 1990s as I was finishing my degree in political science at the University of Louvain-la-Neuve in Belgium. At the time, the Internet was starting to become widely used among the scientific community, mainly to correspond via e-mails and to elaborate basic Web sites. Like most people, I was fascinated by the new possibilities of interactions it provided, however, I was skeptical about the social consequences that this extraordinary evolution could imply. My major fear was that this evolution could lead to the emergence of an increasingly realistic and attractive virtual world that would inevitably annihilate the possibility of a genuine understanding of others, of our environment, and of ourselves. In other words, I deeply felt that the Internet could become the missing technique that could boost the increasingly realistic three-dimensional electronic platforms, such as game and simulation software, and enable a new interactive dimension through which people would be blessed by an almost divine ability to construct and integrate any virtual worlds they would wish. Paul Virilio, an author whose work I enjoyed reading, suggested that people would soon be granted the possibility of entering a new form of second life by way of a dedicated outfit composed of numerous electronic sensors connected to a computer and the Internet. Thanks to this apparatus, they would experience through all senses (smell, sight, touch, etc.) an infinity of fascinating electronic worlds; it would even become possible to have sexual intercourse, as in “real” life, with a clone or with a counterpart equipped with a similar outfit. For me, the danger of such an evolution was patent: if one could live in a sort of virtual paradise, why would they like to stay on an earth with its constraints and deceptions? At the same time, I had the romantic conviction, which I still in part have, that this technological evolution could distance us from Nature, which is the essence of our existence. As a student in political science, my fascination for the virtual world almost naturally led me to start reflecting on the consequences

xii

Foreword

of these evolutions on political processes. I was given the chance to meet a very enthusiastic and passionate guest professor at the University of Louvain-la-Neuve, Riccardo Petrella, who also worked at the European Commission in a specialized prospective cellule aiming to analyze the notion and consequences of the information society at the European level. He, therefore, accepted to supervise my final dissertation where for the first time I worked on the notion of e-democracy. This was the beginning of an intellectual and human endeavor that offered me the opportunity to work on the notion of e-democracy, and more specifically of e-deliberation, in that particularly inspiring context of the European University Institute in Florence—where I would be invited to write my PhD. In this superb environment, I collaborated with people who were particularly helpful. I should mention, first, Alexander Trechsel, with whom I worked on the notion of Internet voting in the context of the canton of Geneva (Switzerland). I should also mention Philippe Schmitter, Fernando Mendez, and again Alexander Trechsel for the broad comparative content analysis of the political parties and parliaments we realized for the 25 EU countries. I should not forget Jürg Steiner with whom I had—and probably will continue to have—passionate debates on the methods of operationalizing the deliberative theory and its criteria, nor Diego Galli who, as member of the direction of the Italian Party (Radicali Italiani), granted me privileged contact with its members as well as the understanding of the peculiar dynamics of this fascinating party. I would like to express my gratitude to the following persons as well as those who helped me at one moment or another to achieve this work through their human support or by revising the manuscript: Vince Arnaudies, Michele Canonica, Jean Dubois, Fernand Fehlen, Davy Janssen, Hans Peter Kriesi, Patrizia Nanz, Philippe Poirier, the team at MPS, Lukas Sosoe, Vassiliki Triga, Ioana Tudor, and Peter Wagner. Lastly, I dedicate this work to both my Danielles, my mother and my wife, who through their unfailing love and vitality are my strongest supporters.

Introduction I believe in the necessity of participative democracy for implementing reforms that are fair. I don’t believe in reforms, even the ones based on good intention, that are imposed on the citizens after pretence of consultation Speech of Segolène Royal to the international seminar on participative budgeting in Bello Horizonte, December 17, 2008 Government should be participatory. Public engagement enhances the Government’s effectiveness and improves the quality of its decisions. Knowledge is widely dispersed in society, and public officials benefit from having access to that dispersed knowledge. Executive departments and agencies should offer Americans increased opportunities to participate in policymaking and to provide their Government with the benefits of their collective expertise and information. Executive departments and agencies should also solicit public input on how we can increase and improve opportunities for public participation in Government. Memorandum for the Heads of Executive Government and Agencies, Transparency and Open Government, January 21, 2009

Royal and Obama are two prominent and influential political figures of our century who have in common a strong belief in the benefits of a large diffusion of participative and deliberative ideals to improve the democratic process. Segolène Royal, the unexpected finalist of the French presidential elections of 2007, made an important use of the Internet during her political campaign through her Web site “désir d’avenir” (www.desirsdavenir.org/) that aimed to gather new sympathizers and get their feedback on the topics of the campaign. She has also implemented an impressive amount of deliberative experiments in the French political entity of Poitou-Charente that she leads, such as “participative budgeting” for high schools that allows citizens directly concerned about the future of these schools (students, parents, school staff ) to deliberate and vote on the projects that should be financed by the region and the “citizens’ jury,” which in turn allows randomly chosen citizens to evaluate, during a period of three days, the efficiency of the politics of the region. Barack Obama,

2


who famously started his career as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago, made an even more efficient use of the interactive and collaborative potential of the new media during his political campaign and continues to do so as president of the United States through the White House Web site (www.whitehouse.gov). This portal is extensively used, not only to increase the transparency of and accessibility to the official documents and speeches, but also to promote a direct and convivial communication between the president and the citizens (in particular through the weekly video address of the president) and to foster direct participation of the citizens by promoting online debates and consultations. Macon Phillips, the young Director of New Media for the White House, declared in one of the first messages sent in the White House blog that the administration plans to publish all nonemergency legislation on the Web site for five days and allow the public to review and comment before the President signs it (Philips 2009). The cases of Obama and Royal are in reality the most visible part of a much broader tendency to modify the existing limited forms of political participation in favor of a more inclusive, participative, and deliberative forms of participation. While new interactive media, particularly the Internet, cannot be considered to be at the source of this phenomenon, they have certainly contributed to its diffusion by facilitating the development of these new forms of political involvement. Recent data reveal that one in four Internet users within the then 15 member states of the European Union claimed to have visited online forums (Flash EB 135 2002), that 17 percent of French Internet users debated online during the 2007 presidential election (IFOP 2007), and that one in four young citizens (24 percent) from the 27 EU member states posted political comments on online forums in the last year (Flash EB 202 2007). The democratic potentialities of the new communication technologies that are regularly promoted by major supranational organizations (OECD 2003; Hansard Society 2007; United Nations and Interparliamentary Union 2008; Council of Europe 2009) have already been implemented by a wide range of political actors: many political parties and civil society associations use the Internet for their militant work and for conducting their campaigns. Some institutional actors—such as the parliaments, local authorities, or the governmental agencies—use it in order to promote public debates and to conduct e-consultations on specific topics, and an increasing number of traditional media—such as the radio, the television, and the press—refer to the debates taking place on the forums of their Web sites to organize and enrich their broadcasts. This trend toward virtualization of public debates is very differently assessed by those scholars who have analyzed the democratic consequences that may result from it. Optimists welcome the potential diffusion of online political

Introduction

3

debates to promote a decision-making process that is more participative, inclusive, and plural (Grossman 1995; Coleman and Goetz 2001). On the opposite side, pessimists see dire consequences for the future of democracy. Among other things, it is argued that the online debates attract citizens who are already politically active, therefore increasing the gap between the civic and noncivic citizens (Davis 2005; Norris 2001). It is also argued that the virtualization of debates by creating and fostering communities of like-minded people could lead to an increased balkanization of the society and to a polarization of opinions (Sunstein 2001). Finally, several scholars and practitioners believe that Computer Mediated Communication (CMC)—generally based on anonymity, absence of direct contact, and absence of moderation—does not allow for the emergence of qualitative and accountable political debates (Davis 2005). According to this view, CMC is conducive to cheap talk on private matters but certainly not to deliberative political debates. The study presented in this volume aims to offer a first global assessment of the deliberative potentials that derive from the virtualization of the political debates by focusing on three issues. The first concerns the usage of the online forums: only if the online debates are used by a large amount of people that represent the plurality of opinions present in the society could the virtualization of the political debates be considered able to promote the deliberative model of democracy. The second issue concerns the offer of the online political forum. On the basis of existing Web content analysis we will evaluate which political actors’ categories offer possibilities of online debates. From a deliberative perspective, this question is important for the potential of online debate to influence the decision-making process and, as we will see, the quality of online debates will depend on the contexts where these are implemented. The third issue concerns the quality of the online debates by empirically assessing their deliberativeness and by identifying the factors that influence it. This is based on a comprehensive review of existing findings on the deliberativeness of online political debates and on the basis of two original case studies: the analysis of the Italian Radical Party’s online forum and the online campaign for local elections in Issy-les-Moulineaux in France. The investigation of these three issues—usage, offer, and deliberativeness of online debates—will be subdivided into six chapters. In Chapter 1 we will discuss the concept of deliberative democracy from a broad perspective. We will first focus on the notion of the public sphere, which is the beating heart of the deliberative democratic project, by presenting and discussing the complementary and still-relevant analysis of the emergence and disappearance of the public sphere since the eighteenth century that Habermas (1989) and Sennet (1992) performed. This sociohistorical

4


review is followed by an updated definition of the notion of the deliberative model of democracy and is concluded by presenting and discussing the major criticisms that are generally formulated against the deliberative model. In Chapter 2 we will present the deliberative discursive criteria that are traditionally developed in the specialized literature. The deliberative criteria scrutinized are the following: inclusion, discursive equality, reciprocity, justification, reflexivity, empathy, sincerity, plurality and external impact. For each of them we propose a strategy of operationalization that is considered to be the most appropriate to evaluate the deliberativeness of the online public spaces. In the same chapter we will also distinguish four different theoretical models of deliberative democracy (globalizing model, two-track model, the critical democratic model, and the impact model) that highlight contradictory views on how the discursive criteria should be applied to the different categories of political actors (civil society, institutional actors, private actors). We suggest that such contradictions invite the deliberative research to enter in an empirical phase aiming at identifying how concretely the deliberative criteria could be applied at the different levels of the decision-making process. Only if the deliberative research follows this path can it contribute to the elaboration of a credible, coherent and useful model of democracy. In Chapter 3 we will start the empirical analysis of the online public spaces by looking first at their diffusion. We will look at the user side by referring to broad online surveys that quantify the participation of EU and U.S. citizens according to the kind of debates (general versus political) and the sociodemographic categories of users (age, gender, political activism, Information and Communication Technologies skills, etc.). We will then look at the offer side by analyzing the online offer of three essential actors of the political process: the parliament through the analysis of the interactive offer of 42 parliamentary Web sites from the EU countries; the political parties through the analysis of the interactive offer of 163 political parties from the EU countries; and the cities through the analysis of studies that have looked at the interactive offer of the major cities in the EU and the United States and of hundreds of cities in the UK, France, Norway, and Sweden. This comparative analysis is interesting not only because it presents a unique broad comparison of the Web-interactive offer of these actors but also because it reflects their different participative cultures. In Chapter 4 we will start our investigation of the deliberativeness of the online debates and of the factors that may influence it. This will be completed through the analysis of the existing studies that have attempted to measure it in different contexts. There are studies looking at the deliberativeness of political newsgroups in different countries and on different topics. Other studies look at the deliberativeness of debates on the Web

Introduction

5

forums hosted by different newspapers/magazines. Finally, some studies will look at the deliberativeness of the debates in experimental forums and e-consultation forums. This broad comparative analysis, though its significance is weakened by the fact that they are not always based on the same deliberative criteria and on the same strategies for operationalizing them, nevertheless reveals some factors that may influence the level of participation and deliberation of the online public spaces. We argue that the factor that has the most prominent impact on the deliberativeness of the debates is the external impact factor, by which we suggest that if participants at an online forum believe that what they write is widely read and is likely to have an impact on the decision-making process, they should be more motivated to participate and to adopt a deliberative attitude. The investigation of the deliberativeness of the online debates and of the factors that may influence it continues in the last two chapters by analyzing two original case studies. The first one is the forum hosted by the web site of a small and highly innovative Italian political party, the Radicali Italiani (Chapter 5). This Web forum is particularly interesting because it is a very successful Web forum and also because it has an important impact on the decision-making process of the party itself. Such a case study therefore contributes in understanding the factors that explain the success of a Web forum and the functions that an online forum can play within a partisan structure. The second case study we analyzed is the Web-electoral campaign set up for the online election of 16 local councilors in Issy-les-Moulineaux, a city situated in the periphery of Paris famous for its innovative democratic experiments (Chapter 6). This unique trial offers the possibility to analyze for the first time a preelectoral public space that could prefigure the types of debates that could emerge in the future if, as it seems to be the case, voting procedures were increasingly transferred to the Web. In synthesis, the purpose of this research is to first analyze the extent of the offer and usage of online political debates, then to evaluate the quality of the online debates in general and to identify the factors that may influence it, and finally to promote an empirical-based strategy for implementing a more realistic model of deliberative democracy. A criticism that can already be anticipated is that such a type of research is in reality futile because of the rapid technological evolution. One can indeed argue that the findings obtained are already or will become meaningless very soon due to the extremely swift evolution of the new media and of their use. Our research is essentially based on written-online debates (newsgroups, Web forums, the e-consultation debates), and it is true that many debates nowadays take place on other types of platforms, which also involve the audiovisual media. This being said, one should also

6


recognize that written exchanges will never be totally replaced by the audio-video exchanges because they offer a system of exchange that is unique and irreplaceable. Moreover there are some lessons that can be drawn from our investigation that do not depend on external factors, such as technological evolution, but that are related to the general behavioral aspects. These are the ones that are related to the deliberative attitude of the citizens, which, as we will try to demonstrate, is likely to vary according to different contextual factors such as the one we identified as the external impact factor. Finally, we elaborated sophisticated methods for operationalizing the deliberative discursive criteria that, this is our hope, should be useful not only for the online deliberative empiricists, but also for the offline deliberative empiricists to elaborate a model of deliberative democracy in which the normative principles could be concretely applicable in the real world.

Chapter 1

Deliberative Democracy: Origins, Meaning, and Major Controversies Even though an increasing number of scholars and practitioners portray themselves as deliberative democrats, the deliberative model of democracy is still a blurry and polemical concept in so far as its definition, normative justifications, and methods of realization are multiple, changing, and widely criticized. The aim of this chapter is, on the one hand, to clarify this notion by going back to its origins and presenting an updated definition of it and, on the other hand, to evaluate its feasibility by discussing the main criticisms it faces. The notion of deliberative democracy is first explored from a sociohistorical perspective by analyzing how Habermas (1989) and Sennet (1977), already in the 1970s, defended the idea that the democracies of the twentieth century need be erected on a genuine and critical “public space” that would be inspired by the public space that emerged in the eighteenth century. Such an analysis is useful not only to the extent that it prefigures the modern notion of deliberative democracy, but also because it provides a still-influential review of negative impacts of the industrial, technical, and economical transformations of the last two centuries on public opinion. Finally, these analyses are particularly interesting for they inspire some original questions regarding the deliberative potential of the online public spaces, some of which will be further analyzed in the empirical part. The notion of deliberative democracy is then compared with the major competing democratic approaches of political decision making: the liberal and republican models of democracy, on the one hand, and

8


the aggregative model of democracy, on the other hand. This “classical” comparative review allows for the clear identification of the reasons that are generally put forward to justify the normative supremacy of the deliberative project in comparison to the competing models of democracy. The deliberative project will then be critically discussed in the last section of this chapter in light of arguments that sharply challenge its feasibility. Two fundamental aspects of the deliberative model will be disputed: the first being the discursive requirements that are considered to be antinomic to the strategic motivations that characterize the political processes; the second concerning the deliberative requirements of inclusion and political activism that are considered to be hardly reachable in modern societies that tend to be depoliticized and passive. In the context of our research, this critical analysis of the deliberative model of democracy is important in order to justify the choice of adopting its normative standards as criteria for evaluating the new online public spaces. Indeed, even though these standards will “just” be empirically tested—therefore tacitly acknowledging that they could not be met—convincing claims should be made that the deliberative criteria could (at least partly) be reached. 1.1

The Public Sphere, Its Origins, and Decline

The investigations of the origins and decline of the public sphere conducted by Sennet and Habermas, even if undertaken some decades ago, are still of great contemporary relevance and contribute to understanding the main reasons for the success of the deliberative democratic theory. The choice of these two authors is also justified by the similarity of their global analyses of the evolution of public space, which nonetheless remain rooted in different explanations. They both regard the period that precedes the Great Revolution as a golden age for the public space, and both judge the genuine character of this public space to have steadily declined since the nineteenth century and to have almost disappeared during the twentieth century. Their historical reconstruction of the evolution of the public space is therefore complementary. It provides a richer definition of the notion of public space, a varied list of reasons that explain its decline and, also, an encompassing analysis of the sociopolitical consequences of this decline. Additionally, one can extract from their investigations some interesting and original questions concerning the potential impact of the online public spaces to allow a revival of a genuine public space. These are linked to the capacity of the online discursive spaces to promote the emergence of new ideas in the political debate, their ability to favor the appearance of new political

Deliberative Democracy

9

communities, and their capacity to foster genuine and inclusive forms of political debates. The presentation of the two authors begins with their analyses of the appearance of the idealized public space during the eighteenth century, followed by their accounts of the reasons and sociopolitical consequences of its decline during the nineteenth and twentieth century. The chapter then concludes with a discussion of the solutions they propose for promoting a revival of a genuine public space and with an elaboration of some open questions concerning the potential impact of the online public spaces. 1.1.1 The Golden Age of the Public Space: The City Theatrum Mundi and the Bourgeois Coffeehouses

Both Sennet in The Fall of the Public Man (1977) and Habermas in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989) have considered the eighteenth century as the period during which a genuine public space could emerge and flourish in the major cities of the western societies. However, the two scholars do not share the same definition of the public space and do not put forward the same reasons to explain this phenomenon. In the case of Sennet, the public space corresponds to the general spaces of socialization where any type of matter (not necessarily political) is discussed, while for Habermas the public space corresponds to political spaces of socialization in which citizens gathered to debate about public matters freely and independently. Concerning the reasons for its emergence, Sennet focuses on the spontaneity of the public relations that could occur because of the social rules and values of the public sphere that were clearly distinguished from the one characterizing the intimate sphere, while Habermas explains the emergence of the public sphere by linking it to the appearance of an educated and literate bourgeoisie that started developing independent and critical opinions in reaction to the absolute power of the monarchy. The original thesis of Sennet is to consider that numerous and varied interactions (in theaters, streets, parks, and coffeehouses) could flourish in the eighteenth century cities due to the fact that in public circumstances the personality was separated from the appearance. The public places at that time are compared to spontaneous “theatrum mundi” where anybody was like an actor who played a role that did not have to correspond to what he actually was. In order to show how the personality was separated from the appearance, Sennet focuses on two aspects that characterized the interaction at that time: the way people were dressed in public and the way people talked in public circumstances. Regarding

10


the first aspect, Sennet indicates that the body in public was used as a mannequin, which clearly suggests that the body in public was not supposed to reflect the personality of its “owner” but was rather perceived as a support to fulfill social functions. In particular, the major aim in using the body as a mannequin was to appear publicly in a clear social role. The purpose was “to make it possible for other people to act as if they knew who you were” (Sennet 1977, 68). In other words, the appearance in public was manipulated so as to be more precise indicators of social position. “Whether people were in fact what they wore was less important than the desire to wear something recognizable in order to be someone in the street” (idem, 67). For instance, the new types of workers who inhabited the city and had no appropriate clothing to wear in the street used costumes that clearly were labels of a particular trade or profession but had little relation to the trade or profession of the wearer. The distance between the body and the personality was particularly deep among the members of the upper class and the aristocracy of that time: they decorated their body with a multiplicity of ornaments such as superlative wigs (like for example the “Pouf au sentiment”), they wore masks or painted their faces in order to hide their imperfections, and they even drew patches that, according to their location on the body, conveyed different messages.1 This public dissociation between oneself and their appearance made exchanges much simpler since “life is more sociable if one takes people as they are and not as they probably are” (idem, 68). This is why Sennet considers that “the use of artifice in the mid-18th Century should be treated with respect even if today no one would wish to revive the society in which they appeared” (idem, 72). Besides the fact that appearance in public did not reflect the personality of the wearer, “speeches” in public were separated from the personality of the speaker. In other words, “speech was treated as a sign rather as a symbol” (idem, 64). This meant that “speech signified in and of itself, rather by reference to outside situations or to the person of the speaker” (idem, 65). Such a separation from the personality allowed a greater freedom of speech intended as a greater spontaneity of speech. In synthesis, the art of dressing and the art of speech of the 1750s were conventions that enabled strangers to interact without having to probe into personal circumstances: the art of dressing by depersonalizing the body and by providing clear social references to the strangers—no matter if these corresponded to the reality—and the art of speech by separating personality from the speech and by clearing social differences. It follows from these conventions that public relations were more spontaneous because “people did not have at every moment to engage in a process of decoding to know what was really being said to them behind the gesture.


11

This was the logic of the points: spontaneity was a product of artificiality” (idem, 80).2 Similarly to Sennet, Habermas observes that the public spaces were particularly numerous and vibrant at that time, but while Sennet looks at all the types of public spaces and insists on their spontaneous character, Habermas focuses on a specific public sphere—the bourgeois public sphere—that played a major political role and was characterized by discursive attributes that prefigured the ones that would be adopted by the deliberative democrats. Habermas describes the bourgeois public sphere of the eighteenth century as an absolutely new space of exchanges that has contributed for the first time in history to the emergence of an independent critical public opinion that counterbalanced the power of the absolute sovereignty of the monarchy. Its aim was not to rule but to construct a new basis for legitimation of the power. At the roots of this new social phenomenon were the increasingly numerous and influential associations where discussion took place around literature and more generally around culture. They provided a training ground for a critical reflection on public issues and also a more profound understanding of the genuine experience of the novel private life. These cultural public spheres were attended by the humanistic-aristocracy that was progressively distancing itself from the court and by the new cultivated bourgeois who learned from the former the art of rational-critical debate. From a discursive perspective, Habermas elaborated a strongly idealized vision of the bourgeois public sphere that will acquire a pivotal place in his theory of deliberative democracy. It is described as a critical space of discussion located between the private sphere and the state in which participants were private people. Concretely, the Habermassian bourgeois public space was characterized by a bracketing of status differences, even though it is admitted that they existed,3 by the acceptance that the rational argument became the sole arbiter of any issue, and by a real and symbolic inclusiveness according to which the public spaces were open to anybody who wanted to participate and people participating in the debates were conscious of being a member of a larger public.4 The reference to private people signifies that the use of public reason is guided by the new intimate part of the private sphere that appeared as a distinctive sphere of socialization during the eighteenth century: it is a sphere that is separated from the sphere of necessities and social reproduction, and where the human being can experience its “free interiority” and a profound “sense of humanity” (idem, 28). The family, perceived as the heart of the intimate sphere, played a crucial role in the functioning of the public sphere, which Calhoun formulates as follows: “The family thus provided a crucial basis for the immanent critique of the bourgeois public sphere itself, for it taught that there was something

12


essential to humanness that economic or other status could not take away” (Calhoun 1992, 11). 1.1.2 The Decline of the Public Space: Its Origins and Its Consequences

Habermas and Sennet have both observed that the idyllic period of the public sphere lasted for just a few decades, and was then followed by an inexorable decline that finds its roots in the structural sociopolitical changes of the nineteenth century (industrial capitalism, state interventionism, emergence of the social question, universal suffrage) the tendency of which has been amplified by the evolutions of the twentieth century, particularly through the mass-mediatization of politics, the consumerist culture, the atomization and individualization of society, and the transformation of the architecture. The two authors, however, come to similar conclusions though they follow different paths. For Sennet, these structural changes have led to a psychological inability of the citizens to have spontaneous debate in public circumstances, while for Habermas these same changes had more structural impacts that have progressively encroached upon the vital ground of the public sphere. He argues that the deliberative characteristics of the public sphere have been perverted by the emergence of the social question, the politicization of an increasing number of issues, and by the disintegration of a genuine, private, and intimate sphere that has been invaded by the state and the consumerist culture. 1.1.2.1 Origins and Consequences of the Decline according to Sennet Sennet considers that the major reason for the decline of the public space is the increasing and almost obsessive focus that citizens gave, since the nineteenth century, to their psychic life. This focus on inner/personal life, which corresponds to an obsessive and romantic desire of authentic self-realization, has been deleterious for developing spontaneous human interactions. As he puts it, “this psychic life is seen as so precious and so delicate that it will wither if exposed to the harsh realities of the social world, and will flower only to the extent that it is protected and isolated” (Sennet 1977, 4). At the origins of this evolution is the emergence of the industrial capitalism that, at the turn of the nineteenth century, encouraged a generalized withdrawal into the family, which was perceived as the only possible shield against the new capitalistic logic that was characterized by “shocks of economic order which neither the victors nor the victims understood” (idem, 20) and by a homogenization and confusion of public appearance resulting from the mass production of goods. The family, by becoming a haven from terrors of society, was


13

gradually conceived as morally superior to the public domain and, as a consequence, its values and standards were progressively transposed to the public sphere. According to Sennet, this transposition could only lead to the decline of the public sphere since values that are typical of the familial interactions such as simplicity, humanity, and authenticity are incompatible with the realization of genuine interactions within the public sphere.5 In his analysis of the family, Sennet, however, agrees with Habermas that the new status of the intimate sphere was not purely negative for the public life. The discovery that life was not just about social convention but also about human feelings and values had a positive impact on the public interactions for it introduced a moral principle according to which “the world of public convention must not weaken the pursuit of happiness, insofar as this pursuit depended on a sense of psychic integrity and respect of oneself or another as a man” (idem, 98). In other words, the principle of intimacy was positive as long as it transmitted a sense of humanness to the public life, but became destructive once it defined the principles of social interaction. It is interesting to note that while Habermas recognized as well as Sennet that the intimate sphere played a fundamental role for enriching the new public sphere with a sense of humanness, he did not consider that the reference to it led to the desegregation of the public sphere by transforming public citizens from spontaneous, communicative human beings into oversensitive, frightened, and taciturn human beings. Sennet has identified a great number of negative consequences resulting from the principle of intimacy in public life. These consequences, expressed in a rather confusing way in the different parts of his opus, can be limited to four. From a personal perspective, it is harmful for the psychological harmony of the citizens and is likely to inhibit their having fruitful encounters with people who are unknown. From a political perspective, it has led to a decrease of the rational-critical opinion formation, to the appearance of a new type of community that tends to be purely auto-referential, and to a strong downgrading of the impersonal culture of urbanity so important for making rich and diverse encounters. Concerning the personal impact, the appearance of the “principle of intimacy” in the public life is presented as a terrible cataclysm that strongly destabilized the psychological harmony of the members of the society: according to this view, citizens suffered from psychological instability since their intimate feelings were “no longer restrained by a public world in which people make alternative and countervailing investment of themselves” (idem, 6). They suffered from a perpetual sense of dissatisfaction since they had the impression of never reaching the authenticity of feelings they were looking for when they socialized. Finally, they were victims

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of a perpetual anxiety for they were afraid that their appearance would reveal aspects of their personalities they wanted to hide. As Sennet puts it: “As people’s personalities came to be seen in their appearances, facts of class and sex thus became matters of real anxiety” (idem, 168). In social contexts where every detail of appearance and behavior is scrutinized for discovering elements concerning the personality, there is no other choice but to adopt strategies of dissimulation. Therefore, during the Victorian period, a large category of people faced this anxiety by hiding their appearance (in particular social and sexual) or even by stopping feeling. Concretely, this meant that people stopped expressing themselves spontaneously in public and put on clothes that suppressed the physical deformation of the body, in such a way that “the body [was] twisted out of any natural shape, … cease[d] to speak” (idem, 174). The interactions (not necessarily political) were also strongly affected by the generalized obsession of discovering the inner aspect of a person for it encouraged people to be less respectful of others’ privacy, which inevitably led to quarrels6 and to a rapid exhaustion of interaction with unknown persons, since after a while of showing themselves unveiled “there is nothing more to say” (idem, 10).7 Looking now at the political consequences, the invasion of the principle of intimacy in public life encouraged the appearance of situations in which the public actors were evaluated on the basis of their personality and not anymore of their actions. “The system of public expression became one of personal representation: a public figure presents to others what he feels, and it is this presentation of feeling which arouses belief ” (idem, 26). In other words, this means that a “political leader running for office is spoken to be credible or legitimate in terms of what kind of man he is, rather in terms of actions or programs he espouses” (idem, 4). Such a focus on personality, which has been amplified by the use of the mass media, deprived citizens of their ability to develop a rationalcritical approach on political matters and led to a subtle form of class domination “through the imposition of bourgeois canons of respect of genuine personality” (idem, 26). More originally, Sennet suggests that the principal of intimacy in political life led to the suspension of the “ego interest” of the citizens. By comparing the political representations to artistic performances, Sennet argues that the citizens were carried along by the personal representation of the politicians to such an extent that they ended up being distracted from their real interest. Citizens, in other words, wanted to be moved by a politician, they wanted to experience him: “Their focus is more on who he is rather than on what he can do for them” (idem, 221). This intriguing thesis is nicely exemplified by Sennet’s description of the poet and politician Lamartine, who, during the Parisian


15

revolution of 1848, had been able to subjugate the crowds and to calm down the revolt by focusing the general attention on himself as a human being of superior status: charisma—that is based on a representation of the self—would therefore have a subtle stabilizing impact on the people. The principle of intimacy is also perceived as a major factor for explaining the formation and inefficiency of the new type of communities that emerged in the 1940s and 1950s in reaction to the impersonality that governed modern cities and societies. These communities were constructed on the basis of a social adaptation of the principle of intimacy according to which if “there is no psychological openness there can be no social bond,” which is very different from the social community of the eighteenth century that was based on social conventions. The major weakness of such groups, however, is what keeps them together can only be a very fragile and unstable common value: the fraternal bond can only be “acts of projection” and “acts of fantasy” that are based on personal symbols and personal principles that are generally inspired by some leaders of the group. However, such symbols of personality are so unstable and grandiose that they lead to a situation in which the action of the group tends to become exclusively directed toward itself to define what the constitutive principles are in order to belong to the group. As a consequence, the group becomes politically inefficient and self-destructive. In other words, it has become “a phenomenon of collective being rather than collective action” and “the only transaction for the group to engage in is that of purification, of rejection and chastisement of those who are not like the others” (idem, 223). These auto-referential and auto-destructive dynamics serve the interests of the larger and institutionalized political structures since they distract the (active) citizens from the broader political challenges in favor of more personal and local issues.8 Finally, Sennet underlines that to the strong valorization of fraternal bonds in public life corresponds an absolute depreciation of the impersonal culture of the large cities. As he puts it: “The more the myth of empty impersonality, in popular forms, becomes the common sense of a society, the more will that populace feel morally justified in destroying the essence of urbanity, which is that men can act together, without the compulsion to be the same” (idem, 255). Sennet notices that the modern urbanists have echoed this need for an intensification of the human relations within the cities by “conceiving the community against the city” (idem, 294), which corresponds to “the territory of warm feelings versus the territory of blankness” (idem, 301). They have promoted the creation of small neighborhoods with people of similar status (ghettos) and the functional division of the city, according to which “each space of the city does a particular job.” The modern architects—considered “among the few professionals to work with

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present-day ideas of public life” (idem, 12)—have contributed to encourage the disappearance of public life in the cities by promoting the construction of buildings that tend to be increasingly functional for valorizing the fast movement and less and less convivial to allow encounters.9 The major dangers deriving from this double phenomenon—the multiplication of ghettos in the cities and the disappearance of neutral and convivial urban areas of encounters—is the loss of opportunities to have unexpected encounters that are necessary for both the psychological harmony of the people and the democratic functioning of the state.10 1.1.2.2 Origins and Consequences of the Decline According to Habermas According to Habermas, the rational-critical bourgeois public sphere, which initially rested merely on the disengagement of elements of social reproduction and political power, declined as a consequence of the mutual interpenetration of state and society. This interpenetration has lead to a gradual destruction of the basis of the bourgeois public sphere, which has been replaced by a politicized social sphere. The separation of the state and the private sphere has been weakened with the appearance and growth of the market economy that has required forms of administrative intervention of the state. This new type of state interventionism, initiated by the end of the nineteenth century, had its origins “in the transfer onto a political level of such conflicts of interest that could no longer be settled with the private sphere alone” (Habermas 1989, 142). Particularly, state intervention was justified in the domain of the economy to counterbalance the perverted effect of the free and capitalistic economy that permitted the concentration of power in a few hands. The state has implemented protectionist legislation as well as antitrust and anticartel legislation, and, at the international level, price and production agreements. State intervention in private affairs was further encouraged by the growth of the demand from the masses that were politicized by means of universal suffrage and through the reinforcement of socialist parties and trade unions.11 Under these pressures, the state became active in numerous private fields. Besides the traditional function of maintaining order, it began to assume educational and social functions aimed at protecting the weaker social groups. Finally, the state took over provision of services that hitherto had been left to private hands. One of the major consequences of the state interventionism in private affairs is the transformation of the eighteenth century intimate sphere (in particular the family). By becoming economically more fragile (absence of property owner, dependence on external wages) and dependent on the state intervention for its survival, the family progressively stopped being a place of control,


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protection, and socialization of humans.12 As a consequence, the family could not fulfill anymore its functions of feeding the public sphere with a sense of humanity, a decline that is reinforced by the fact that family members spent less reflexive moments on their own and preferred to consume and to be entertained in the community. This transformation corresponds to what Habermas calls a “fetichism of community,” which implies that the moments one spends alone, on pursuits like reading and thinking, become rarer. In other words, the valorized family of the eighteenth century evolved in reaction to the capitalistic changes into a weak community of leisure and entertainment, a community that cannot feed the public sphere with elements of critical humanness anymore. The mutual interpenetration of the state and society and the commercialization of the social and political life had major negative consequences for the public sphere that will now be analyzed in detail. Habermas observes, as does Sennet, that the modern mass-mediatized public sphere is strongly commercialized and, as a consequence, unadapted to the appearance of rational, free, inclusive, and critical debates. The well-known criticisms against the role of mass media within the political process is that it corresponds to a context of interaction where “discussions are formalized,” where “the presentation of positions and counter position is bound to certain prearranged rules of the game,” where “what can be posed as a problem is defined as a question of etiquette,” and where “conflicts, once fought out in public polemics, are demoted to the level of personal incompatibilities” (idem, 164). From the viewpoint of the reception, it is an interactive context that does not allow a greater knowledge and understanding of world issues since the immediacy of the mass media and their marketing logics lead to a bracketing of personal attributes, a disaffection from rational-critical arguments, and a lowering of the threshold capacity required for appreciating the programs they offer. Additionally the German philosopher observed that the role of control of the noninstitutionalized public, originally the bourgeois public sphere, became extremely limited since “the process of the politically relevant exercise and equilibration of power now directly takes place between the private bureaucracies, specialinterest associations, parties, and public administration” (idem, 176). The problem is that all the political actors who became predominant in this new public sphere fall short of allowing forms of rational-critical debate. The political parties ceased to be groups of voters that were simultaneously groups of participants in the rational-critical public sphere. They became “bureaucratic organizations aimed at motivating voters and attracting their psychological identification and acclamation by voting. Their attention is focused on attracting the votes of those not yet committed. Such parties attempt to move people to offer their acclamation without providing

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political education or remedies for political immaturity of the voters” (idem, 203). This loss of the rational-critical functions of the political parties became particularly obvious during the electoral period under the guidance of election managers who “must not only take note of the disappearance of a genuine public sphere in the realm of politics but must in full consciousness promote it themselves” (idem, 216). With regards to the parliament, Habermas indicates that the liberal concept of legal norm implied that elements of rightness of truth and of justice could not be met anymore. These liberal elements could be met only to the extent that the legislative process was limited to the general conditions of a compromise between interests.13 But with the appearance of the social question, the legislative process has been transformed in a conflict between specific interests where the legislators, who are deprived of their faculty of free debate and voting, have become the agents of parties and special interest groups. In summary, the parliament has become a place where instruction-bound appointees meet to turn their predetermined decisions into bills. Finally, the public, reduced to individual citizens, can hardly contribute to the development of a critical public opinion for it is included only sporadically in this circuit of power, and even then it is brought in only in order to contribute to its acclamation, which is generally embodied by a vote. The acclamation of the public is extremely poor because it is largely influenced by the political propaganda that has adopted the marketing principles of the culture of consumption. This means that the role of publicity has been perverted since “critical publicity” has been supplanted by “manipulative publicity.” As Habermas puts it: “Originally publicity guaranteed the connection between rational-critical public debate and the legislative foundation of domination, including the critical supervision of its exercise. Now it makes possible the peculiar ambivalence of a domination exercised through the domination of nonpublic opinion: it serves the manipulation of the public as much as legitimization before it” (idem, 177–178). By referring to electoral behavioral studies of that time, Habermas considers the marketing strategy to be all the more successful in that the people who are the most likely to be influenced by the political propaganda are the more hesitant and the less involved in political life. It is precisely these defenseless preys that the political parties attempt to attract into their net, not through an appealing program, but through the appealing image and personality of their leading political candidate. 1.1.3

Revival of the Eighteenth Century Public Sphere?

While both Sennet and Habermas make a rather exhaustive analysis of the reasons explaining the decline of the public sphere, they are


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parsimonious in indicating solutions to promote the resurgence of a public space that would maintain the original functions of critical and rational control of state’s power and, at the same time, would adapt to the new sociopolitical realities that we just described. Not surprisingly, Sennet considers that a critical and efficient public space can reemerge only through the rediscovery of “civility” that requires wearing a social mask, as was the case during the eighteenth century. He defines civility as follows: “It is the activity which protects people from each other and yet allows enjoying each other’s company. Wearing a mask is the essence of civility. Mask permits pure sociability, detached from the circumstances of power, malaise, and private feeling of those who wear them” (Sennet 1977, 264). Only if this specific sense of civility is rediscovered will citizens be able to find a balance between their personal and public life and form communities based on impersonality, which are the only ones that allow the pursuit of specific interests in society and challenge the phenomenon of social domination and inequality. In order to reach a revival of the rational-critical public sphere and a legitimation of the political power, Habermas was in favor of a democratization of all the political actors that are part of the political process: the political parties, the special interest associations, the trade unions, and the mass media. The work of these institutions should become transparent and their internal dynamic should be democratized in order “to allow for unhampered communication and public rational critical debate” (Habermas 1989, 209). In addition, these new institutions should be linked to the public sphere and should organize mutual control of observance of the democratic rules.14 As we will see in the next section, Habermas’s position has strongly evolved. It recognizes that it is illusionary to believe that a critical public opinion could emerge from democratization and mutual control of all the political actors and suggests that a critical public opinion can only emerge from a dynamic process in which the civil society would play a fundamental role. Before discussing and comparing more thoroughly the recent theories of deliberative democracy, we would like to introduce at this level of the exposition some questions directly inspired by the analyses of Sennet and Habermas concerning the extent to which the Internet, particularly through the Web debates, could contribute to a resurgence of the public space. The first question concerns the role and impact played by new forms of the intimate sphere created through the virtual networks (for example MySpace; Facebook; Second Life) whose success is continuously growing—rising among the citizens and the politicians.15 If we agree with Habermas and Sennet on the importance of the intimate/private sphere for enriching the public sphere with a sense of humanness and deeper

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inner reflection, the question of the role and impact of these new intimate spheres should be carefully assessed for evaluating how the Internet could have an impact on public opinion. It should be questioned, among other things, whether they correspond to a new commercialization of the intimate sphere, whether they allow enriching exchanges, and whether they favor the appearance of new ideas and propositions in the public sphere. The objective of the present research is not to attempt to provide a first groundbreaking analysis of this link but just to underline that this should be done for this phenomenon’s exponential growth and that its consequences on the political process in general, and the public sphere in particular, could be important and unexpected. The second question refers to the spontaneity of the encounters that Sennet regards as so important to foster debates that would be free, spontaneous, and plural. Do the virtual public spaces, in particularity through the anonymity and the distance they allow, encourage such types of encounters? Or, on the opposite side, by allowing citizens to choose in advance the citizens they want to interact with, does the Internet in reality encourage discursive interaction among like-minded people, which could lead to a further atomization of the society and polarization of the opinions (Sunstein 2001)? In our empirical analysis, we will observe to what extent certain political newsgroups, cities, political parties allow through the usage of online forums for the expression of a plurality of opinions and the encountering people of different origins and with different interests. The third question concerns the new forms of social and political communities and networks whose constitution is strongly facilitated by the Internet. In particular, it is important to assess the types of communities that the Internet fosters: Is it the “destructive Gemeinschaft” described by Sennet that tends to be auto-referential and inefficient? Or, on the contrary, does it encourage the appearance of communities that have a direct impact on the decision-making process? Additionally, referring to Habermas, one should also evaluate whether virtual public spaces could foster a democratization of the internal procedures of the most influential political actors (trade unions, political parties, interest groups, parliaments). Both these questions—the efficiency of the online communities and their democratization—will be analyzed in the empirical part of this work with a focus on the parliament, the political parties, and the cities. A last question to which the present work will pay particular attention is the extent to which the discursive contexts of virtual public spheres correspond in their dynamics and impact those of the bourgeois public sphere. This topic will be carefully analyzed in the empirical part on the basis of the updated definition of the deliberative model of democracy and of the operationalization of the discursive deliberative criteria.


1.2

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Defining Deliberative Democracy

The analyses of Sennet and Habermas offer just a limited definition and justification of what would later become the deliberative model of democracy. In the case of Sennet, it is intended as a sociopolitical system where impersonal and spontaneous forms of interaction would exist, allowing the emergence of an efficient, critical, and noncommercialized political participation. In the case of Habermas, it is intended as a sociopolitical system in which an inclusive critical space of interaction between state and society would exist, functioning as a counterpower to the dominant power. Both authors plead for a reemergence of genuine forms of public interaction based on their observations that these latter have essentially disappeared under the pressure of industrial and commercial structural changes. We propose in this section to update the definition and the justification of the deliberative model of democracy by comparing it, on the one hand, with the republican and liberal models of democracy and, on the other hand, with the aggregative model of democracy. The first set of comparisons (deliberative versus liberal and republican models) is inspired by the work of Habermas (1996, 1998, 2006), while the second one (deliberative versus aggregative models) is inspired by the work of Young (2000) and the recent writings of Gutmann and Thompson (2004). 1.2.1 Deliberative versus Liberal and Republican Model of Democracy

Habermas generally defines deliberative democracy by differentiating it from the republican and liberal models of democracy (Habermas 1996, 1998, 2006). He takes as a common starting point for the three models the acceptance of the basic rules that are common to modern democracies. The first is the right for each citizen to pursue a life on their own. The second is the inclusion of free and equal citizenship into the political community. The third is the independence of a public sphere that operates as an intermediary system between state and society. Each normative approach is characterized by the fact that it gives a greater prominence to one of these normative principles: liberal tradition reveals a preference for the liberties of private citizens; republican tradition stresses the political participation of active citizens; and deliberative tradition insists on the formation of the public opinion. These different normative preferences obviously lead to divergent understandings of the democratic process. We will start by presenting the differences between the republican and liberal traditions and will then compare them with the deliberative democratic conception.

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A first set of distinctions concerns the civic attitude of the citizens and the role of the state. In the liberal approach citizens express private interests that are aggregated into a political will that can affect the administration. In this context the state and the citizens are clearly separated since citizens are willing to preserve their individual rights from external interventions and the state’s raison d´être lies primarily in the protection of equal individual rights. The public sphere plays a minimal role since citizens are supposed to express their opinions and concerns only through the elections of the representative bodies. In contrast, the republican tradition considers that the citizens should ideally be involved in all of the decisions that concern the state. In this vision, the public sphere should be vibrant for discussing public issues and the state should be as inclusive as possible in allowing a direct participation of the citizens in the decision-making process. This means ultimately that the separation between the state, the public sphere, and society should tend to disappear by allowing forms of self-government wherever and whenever possible. By referring to Hannah Arendt, Habermas reformulates this proposition by saying that “in opposition to the civic privatism of a depoliticized population and in opposition to the acquisition of legitimation through entrenched parties, the political public sphere should be revitalized to the point where a regenerated citizenry can, in forms of a decentralized self-governance, appropriate the governmental authority that has been usurped by a self-regulating bureaucracy” (Habermas 1998, 247). As far as the nature of political process is concerned, the liberal view is that “politics is essentially a struggle for positions that grant access to administrative power. The political process of opinion- and will-formation in the public sphere and in parliament is shaped by the competition of strategically acting collective trying to maintain or acquire positions of power” (idem, 243). According to this approach, the democratic process takes place exclusively in the form of compromises between competing interests. Fairness is supposed to be guaranteed by rules of compromise formation (equal rights to vote, representative composition of parliament, etc.). In contrast, according to the republican view, “the political opinion- and will-formation in the public sphere and in parliament does not obey the structures of the market process but rather the obstinate structures of a public communication oriented to mutual understanding. For politics as the citizens’ practice of self-determination, the paradigm is not the market but dialogue” (idem, 244). More precisely this means that “democratic will-formation is supposed to take the form of an ethical discourse of self-understanding,” which implies the preexistence of “a culturally established background of consensus of the citizens, which is rejuvenated through the ritualistic reenactment of a republican


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founding act” (idem, 246). With regard to the concept of sovereignty the republican approach considers that the assembled people are bearers of a sovereignty that cannot in principle be delegated. On the contrary, liberalism defends a more legalist and representative model according to which “the authority emanating from the people is exercised only by means of elections and voting and by specific legislative, executive, and judicial organs” (idem, 250). The specificity of the deliberative approach on these four aspects (civic attitude of the citizens; nature of the political process; sovereignty; role of the state) is the following: as far as the civic attitude of the citizens and the nature of the political process are concerned, Habermas starts defining its deliberative model of democracy by comparing it to the republican model of democracy. He considers that republicanism has the advantage of preserving “the radical meaning of a society that organizes itself through the communicatively united citizens,” but that such a model is too idealistic because “it makes the democratic process dependent on the virtues of the citizens devoted to the public wealth” (idem, 244). A second major problem of republicanism is that it depends on a purely communitarian approach which is not adapted to a plural and complex society. “To be sure, ethical discourse aimed at achieving a collective selfunderstanding … constitutes an important part of politics. But under conditions of cultural and social pluralism, behind politically relevant goals there often lie interests and value-orientations that are by no means constitutive of the identity of the political community as a whole … these interests and value-orientations, which conflict with one another within the same polity without any prospect of consensual resolution, need to be counterbalanced in a way that cannot be effected by ethical discourse” (idem, 245). Differently from the communitarian approach of republicanism, the deliberative approach is more realistic since it recognizes that politics in complex society is also based on “compromises,” on “balancing of interests,” and on “parties that rely on their power and their ability to sanction.” The deliberative approach Habermas advocates for considers that the fairness and the legitimating power of decision making is not based anymore upon the ethical attitude of the subjects but is measured by “presuppositions and procedures which for their part are in need of rational, indeed normative, justification from the standpoint of justice” (idem, 245). The clear advantage of a deliberative approach of democracy that is based on procedural justice is that the questions of justice are not by their very nature tied with any particular collectivity—which is the case of the republican ethical normative approach. The deliberative model in general and the deliberative procedures in particular offer the advantage of being based on moral principles that extend beyond the limits of any

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Table 1.1 Deliberative versus republican and liberal models of democracy Liberal model

Role of the state

Role of the civil society

Minimal/individualistic participation: citizens express private interests that are aggregated into a political will (elections; referendum, etc.).

Maximal/communitarian participation: citizens should participate in all the public decisions.

Deliberative model

High/critical participation: citizens are supposed to be particularly active in the political public space that is independent from state and society. Minimal intervention. State and society The bureaucratic state should State and society should be should be separated. Its major aim (the disappear in favor of a political separated. This is required to state) is to preserve equal individual state where the citizens would be guaranty the existence of a rights and to preserve private interests directly involved through forms public sphere that favors the of the citizens. of decentralized self-governance. development of an inclusive critical opinion formation of state activities. Minimal role: the associations of the civil Civil society should be vibrant in Civil society should be vibrant. It is society, if integrated in the theoretical order to promote self-governance fundamental for the development reconstruction of the democratic process, and to lead to reiteration of selfof a critical public opinion and are considered only as weak understanding of the society. for introducing new issues on the and nondeliberative actors that are political and legislative agendas. part of the political competition for It plays two major functions: a promoting their interests. self-organization function and a function of public/political influence. Civil society should not be critical It should be protected from any to the state decisions and external intervention that could activities. It should contribute pervert its freedom of expression. to them in a positive and constructive way.

10.1057/9780230106376 - Promises and Limits of Web-deliberation, Raphaël Kies


Civic attitude of the citizens

Republican model

Nature of political process

Politics is essentially a struggle for positions that grant access to administrative power.

Sovereignty

Authority emanating from the people is exercised only by means of elections and voting and by specific legislative, executive, and judicial organs.

Only assembled people are the bearers of a sovereignty that can in principle not be delegated.

The heart of politics is situated in the public sphere where the critical, inclusive, and influential public opinion is formed.

This model does not suppose the existence of a culturally established background of consensus.

Fairness of decision is guaranteed by the presuppositions and procedures that derive from structure of linguistic communication and the communicative model of socialization. Sovereignty derives from a decentralized flow of communicative interactions between legally institutionalized will formation and culturally mobilized public.


The process of opinion formation in the public sphere and parliament is shaped by the competition of strategically acting actors trying to acquire or maintaining positions of power. Fairness of decision is guaranteed by the rules of compromise formation.

Democratic will-formation is supposed to take the form of an ethical discourse of selfunderstanding that implies the existence of a culturally established background of consensus. The political opinion formation in the public sphere and the parliament is based on structures of a public communication oriented toward mutual understanding. Fairness of decision is guaranteed by the ethical attitude of the subjects.

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concrete community. These are the discursive principles that are immanent to any human being since “their normative content arises from structure of linguistic communication and the communicative model of socialization” (Habermas 1996, 296–297). As far as the question of the boundaries of the state and society is concerned, Habermas considers, similarly to the liberal model, that the state and society should be separated. The major difference, however, is that while the liberal concept of democracy is in favor of a separation, mainly because it would secure the individual rights and interests of the citizens, the deliberative approach sees in this separation a guarantee for promoting the existence of a public sphere that, on the one hand, allows the emergence and the discussion of issues coming from the citizens themselves and, on the other, allows the development of critical control of the state’s activity. Finally, concerning the question of sovereignty, the deliberative approach aggregates elements from both republican and liberal models while adding new ones. According to the deliberative approach, sovereignty should not exclusively result from the sovereign citizens as defended by the Rousseauistic republicanism. At the same time, differently from the liberal approach, deliberative democracy rejects a purely legalistic notion of sovereignty that considers sovereignty to be enacted “by exercise of elections and voting and by specific legislative, executive, and judicial organs” (Habermas 1998, 250). While the republican concept of sovereignty is unrealistic, a strict application of the liberal model of sovereignty is unadapted to give voice to the social concerns of plural and complex societies. The deliberative theory of Habermas therefore promotes a notion of sovereignty that is at the same time decentralized, socially grounded, and dynamic. Concretely, this means that sovereignty derives from a decentralized flow of communicative interactions between the “legally institutionalized will-formation and culturally mobilized publics” (idem, 250). The legitimating power of such flows of interaction derives from the fact that it allows the plurality of social concerns to be expressed in the political process since public opinion finds its basis “in political associations of civil society distinct from the state and economy alike” (idem, 250). The reference to civil society is extremely important since it is the place where ideas, propositions, and concerns that stem from the citizens themselves can be revealed and expressed. The civil society is independent from both economic system and public administration; it corresponds to the lifeworld where free, open, and enlightened political socialization can take place.16 As indicated by Young, civil society that can be shaped in different categories17 plays two major roles for promoting social justice; firstly through the process “self-organization” that


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corresponds to “the way associations develop forms of communicative interaction and support identities, expand participatory possibilities, and create networks of solidarity” (Young 2000, 163), and secondly, by their activity in the public sphere, which corresponds to the function through which “associational activity aims to influence to reform state or corporate policies and practices” (idem, 163). In synthesis, the deliberative concept of sovereignty derives not only from the participation of the citizens in the electoral and voting processes but also from the effects of a political public space where the encounter and the confrontation of opinions coming from the political/administrative sphere, the economical sphere, and the civil society form a public opinion that can influence the political/administrative power. As Habermas indicates: “The communicative structures of the public sphere constitute a far-flung network of sensors that react to the pressure of society-wide problems and stimulate influential opinions” (Habermas 1996, 300). This means that the deliberative model of democracy regards the political-legal system neither as the peak nor as the center, nor even as the structuring model of society, but only as one action system among others: “It is a sub-system specialized for collectively binding decisions” (idem, 300). 1.2.2

Deliberative versus Aggregative Model of Democracy

Differently from Habermas, Young (2000) and Gutmann and Thompson (2004) define the deliberative model of democracy by comparing it with the aggregative model of democracy. This other strategy for defining deliberative democracy is complementary to the Habermassian one since it offers a broader understanding of the negative consequences of the liberal normative approach, and allows us to understand better why the deliberative approach is considered to be particularly adapted to take fair and moral decisions in modern societies. Similarly to the liberal approach, the aggregative model of democracy is presented as a process of aggregation of citizens’ preferences in choosing political officials and policies. This means that the individual preferences of the citizens are considered as a given element and are valued only “extrinsically according to how many or how few hold them or how strongly” (Young 2000, 20). Such an approach does not take into account how citizens’ preferences may change as a process of interaction with others and does not require that citizens leave the private realm of their own interests when they interact with others whose preference may differ. More generally, and largely as a consequence of the incapacity of the citizens and their representatives to get a reading of their self-interest, the aggregative model does not take into account the possibility of political

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cooperation and coordination because it disregards the possibility of a public formed from the interaction of democratic citizens and their motivation to reach some decision. Finally, such a model denies the possibility of evaluating the moral legitimacy of the substance of decision. This is the case because it does not recognize the possibility that citizens can “make claims with reasons that are objective in the sense that they appeal to general principles beyond the subjective preferences or interests of themselves or others” (Young 2000, 21). In sum, the aggregative model refers to an approach of politics based on immutable personal or group interests that enter in a noncommunicative competition for gaining the political battles, the most important being the electoral battles. Differently from this model, the deliberative model focuses on the opinion formation processes that lead to a political decision. There is a general agreement among the deliberative theorists that deliberation is a form of practical reason that suggests that participants in a public discussion “arrive at a decision not by determining what preferences have the greatest numerical support, but by determining which proposals the collective agrees are supported by the best reasons” (Young 2000, 22). Therefore, as noted by Gutmann and Thompson, the most important characteristic of deliberation is the process of justification that will lead to the best reason: “Most fundamentally, deliberative democracy affirms the need to justify decisions made by citizens and their representatives. Both are expected to justify the laws they would impose on one another. In a democracy, leaders should therefore give reasons for their decisions, and respond to the reasons that citizens give in return” (Gutmann & Thompson 2004, 3). Through this process of interaction and justification, the deliberative model of democracy allows evaluation of the moral legitimacy of the substance of decisions. When compared to the aggregative model of democracy, the deliberative model presents several advantages. It is fairer than the aggregative model for taking decisions: Gutmann and Thompson argue that while a purely aggregative approach of democratic decision making presents the great advantage of relying on relatively uncontroversial procedures to resolve disagreement and to take decisions, it is an unfair method of decision –making leading to social instability because it does not allow the change of existing social injustices. On the opposite side, the aggregative democracy maintains and reinforces existing distribution of power and does not offer any method to challenge such injustices and the methods of aggregation themselves: “By taking existing or minimally corrected preferences as given, as the base line for collective decisions, the aggregative conception fundamentally accepts and may even reinforce existing distribution of power in society. These distributions may


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or not be fair, but aggregative conceptions do not offer any principles by which we can decide. Even more important, they do not provide any process by which citizens’ views about those distributions might be changed” (idem, 16). The deliberative model is also considered to be more adapted than the aggregative model for solving the conflicts and disagreements that are increasingly likely to arise in our plural/complex societies. “If the disagreement is resolvable on reciprocal terms, deliberation is more likely than aggregation to produce agreement. If it is not resolvable, deliberation is more likely than aggregation to produce justifiable agreement in the future, and to produce mutual respect when no agreement is possible” (idem, 20). In other words, the major advantage of a deliberative approach is not only that it is more likely to reach an agreement for the immediate situation of conflict, but also that it preserves the possibility of reaching an agreement in the future between the parties that were involved in the debate, not only agreement on the topics being discussed, but also for other topics. This is what the authors have coined as the “economy of moral disagreement.” This means that deliberators—who are ready to change their mind and willing to maintain the dialogue with the conflicting party—consider it preferable to provisionally bracket during the deliberative process issues about which it is known that no agreement can be found: “By economizing on their disagreements, citizens and their representatives can continue to work together to find common ground, if not on the policies that produced the disagreement, then on related policies about which they stand a greater chance of finding agreement” (idem, 7). Additionally, decisions that have been taken in a deliberative political system are more likely to be accepted by the losing side because they know that at any time these issues can be reintroduced in the public debate: “Those citizens and representatives who disagreed with the original decision are most likely to accept it if they believe they have a chance to reverse or modify it in the future. And they are more likely to be able to do so if they have a chance to keep making arguments” (idem, 7). Finally, from a more philosophical perspective, this notion of “provisionality” of the public decisions is revealing of an epistemic honesty, since it recognizes the fact that decision-making processes and the human understanding upon which they depend are imperfect. We can therefore never be sure that the decisions we make today will be correct tomorrow. In the context of the decision-making process, this means that “deliberative democrats recognize of course that decisions must be made—even when the reason-giving process is incomplete … But deliberative democrats tend to emphasize the provisionality of political outcomes more than the finality” (idem, 15–16).

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Table 1.2 Deliberative versus aggregative model of democracy Aggregative model No focus on opinion formation: preferences of the citizens are considered a given; they do not change on the basis of interaction with other citizens. Such a model does not allow any moral claim on the substance of decisions.

Adaptability to plural complex society

Unadapted to complex/plural societies that are characterized by (strong) moral disagreement. The social disagreements are not sufficiently publicly discussed. Decisions are essentially legitimized by numerical support, which leads to social conflict.

Fairness of outcome

Unfair outcomes: it reinforces existing distribution of power and does not offer any method to challenge such injustices.

Focus on opinion-formation process that leads to a decision; preferences may change on the basis of interaction. What counts is the process of justification, i.e. it is not the proposal that has the greatest numerical support, but the proposal that is supported by the best reason that counts. Through process of interaction based on justification, such a model allows for the evaluation of the moral legitimacy of the substance of decisions. Adapted of complex/plural societies that are characterized by (strong) moral disagreement. Why? If disagreement is resolvable, it is more likely than the aggregative approach to produce an agreement. If disagreement is not resolvable it is more likely to produce justifiable agreement in the future and to produce mutual respect when no agreement possible (see principles of economy of moral disagreement and “provisionality of decision”). The risks of strong moral conflicts are narrowed down. Fairer outcome: the plurality and multiplicity of the opinions are taken into consideration. Decisions are based on moral justification of their substance. Citizens and public representatives are supposed to be ready to change their mind and not be motivated exclusively by their personal interest.



Nature of opinion formation

Deliberative model


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1.2.3 Final Justification for Promoting Deliberative Democracy

By summarizing and reformulating the findings deriving, on the one hand, from the comparison with the liberal and republican model of democracy and, on the other hand, from the comparison with the aggregative model of democracy, it is possible to identify the following reasons explaining why deliberative democracy should be considered as the most desirable model of democracy: It is better adapted to plural and complex societies than the republican and liberal models. The republican approach requires that deliberation must be based on a society characterized by a cultural background of consensus where citizens should be directly involved in the decision-making process since they are the only ones entitled to use their sovereignty. By way of contrast the deliberative model recognizes that deliberation takes place in plural societies and admits the existence of a broader notion of sovereignty that enables the plurality of the existing social opinions to emerge at any time in the opinion- and decisionmaking processes. The deliberative model does not require a purely direct form of sovereignty (republicanism) nor does it require a purely representative form of democracy (liberalism). The deliberative model promotes a continuous and informal form of sovereignty that derives from a decentralized flow of communicative interaction between the legally institutionalized will-formation and culturally mobilized publics. It increases the acceptance and legitimacy of a collective decision. We have underlined essentially three major reasons explaining why this should be the case: first, the greater acceptance of the collective decisions stems from the provisional nature of the political decision, which means that those who do not get what they want, or even what they need, will always be able to pacifically discuss the controversial decisions and attempt to modify them. Second, this greater legitimacy derives from the fact that deliberative procedures guarantee a better inclusion of the opinions concerning a collective decision. From a structural perspective this is the case since the deliberative procedures aim at including in the public debate the ideas that are freely expressed by the citizens in the civil society and, from the viewpoint of the dynamics of the debates, the institutionalized deliberative settings are designed in order to allow a maximum of voices to be heard, that is, everybody is enabled to speak and to give their opinion. Third, the greater acceptance of a collective decision derives from the process of justification that is the essence of deliberation. The fact that a claim is considered valid (or not) essentially on the basis of justified arguments implies that “everyone’s claims have been considered

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on the merits, rather than on the basis of the party’s bargaining power” (Gutmann & Thompson 2004, 10). It is more likely than aggregative democracy to lead to some form of agreement and to limit the danger of polarization of social groups. In case of resolvable conflicts, it is more likely than the aggregative model to find an agreement and in case of unresolvable conflicts, it is more likely than the aggregative model to reach an agreement between the same parties on other issues. This is the case because deliberation promotes mutual respect. As stated by Gutmann and Thompson: “Deliberation cannot make incompatible values compatible, but it can help participants recognize the moral merit in their opponents’ claims when those claims have merit. It can also help deliberators to distinguish those disagreements that arise from genuinely incompatible values from those that can be more resolvable than they first appear” (idem, 11). It increases the likelihood of developing a public spiritedness. Few people tend to be wholly altruistic when they are arguing about contentious issues. “Deliberation in well-constituted forums responds to this limited generosity by encouraging participants to take a broader perspective on questions of common interest” (Gutmann & Thompson 2004, 11). This means also that the use of deliberative procedures should promote a greater social justice by promoting decisions that take into consideration the concerns of weaker sections of its populations. This ambition and attempt to adopt decisions that are nurtured (stoked) by the maximum of existing opinions reveal the particular epistemic nature of deliberation: “When citizens bargain and negotiate, they may learn how better to get what they want. But when they deliberate, they can expand their knowledge, including both their self-understanding and their collective understanding of what will best serve their fellow citizens” (idem, 12). It is through the give-and-take of arguments that citizens can come “to recognize their individual and collective misapprehensions, and develop new views and policies that can more successfully withstand critical scrutiny” (idem, 12). 1.3

Deliberative Democracy and Its Feasibility

Several criticisms concerning the feasibility of the deliberative project have already been tacitly discussed in the comparative analysis of the deliberative model with the other democratic models. One of them argues that the values and procedures promoted by the deliberative democracy are unadapted for societies that are increasingly pluralistic, individualistic, and competitive. This critique has been faced convincingly by Gutmann and Thompson, who argue that deliberation, even if it is not a panacea,


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is in any case more adapted than the other models of democracy (liberal, republican, aggregative) to deal with social disagreements, to limit the dangers of social groups polarization, and, therefore, to guarantee a better social cohesion. Another criticism considers that the deliberative model is not adapted to large-scale societies in which the political system is required to take numerous and urgent decisions. In such circumstances it is argued there is no time to deliberate, leave alone deliberate in an ideal way. As far as this criticism is concerned, the reply to it is rather simple. Most of the deliberative theorists do not naively request the deliberative process to be the only mode of decision making, and they certainly do not request citizens to be directly involved in all the public decisions. For instance, Gutmann and Thompson consider that the debate should make place for other types of decision-making procedures such as bargaining or secret political decisions, but, they specify, these should be justified at some point in the deliberative process. This more realistic approach, shared by most of the deliberative theorists, derives from the fact that deliberation is considered to be a process aiming at a decision that is binding for some period of time.18 The defense of the deliberative model becomes, however, trickier when the question of the deliberative attitudes of the participants is raised. It is the question of “how deliberative can we suppose the citizens to be, or to become?” As a reminder, one of the major requirements of the deliberative model of democracy is that citizens should participate in the political process by adopting a discursive attitude that is similar to the one described in the eighteenth century-public sphere of Habermas. This attitude, which will be analyzed in greater detail in the next chapter, supposes in a nutshell that the citizens and political representatives should be aiming at reaching an agreement, that they should be ready to change their mind, that they should be sincere and respectful, and they should be ready to enter in a process of mutual justification and should consider the concerns of not only the interlocutors who are present but also the ones who are absent. The doubt that arises spontaneously in front of such an impressive list of normative requirements is why citizens and politicians would be ready to adopt such a noble attitude. Why, more particularly, would citizens and politicians who are in a dominant position be willing to deliberate with interlocutors who challenge their positions?19 The major argument of the deliberative democrats in defense of their model is to say that such an attitude is not supposed to derive uniquely from an ethical willingness of the citizens themselves as in the republican model, but from the implementation of deliberative procedures that would be generally accepted since they are based on communicative presuppositions that would be immanent to any human being. This

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purely theoretical and intuitive justification is, however, not convincing. The problem with this argument is that discursive procedures—even the most advanced ones—are not always sufficient to have an impact on the deliberative attitudes of the citizens. One needs just to spend an afternoon watching the parliamentary debates of any country to agree that even in contexts where the procedures are implemented in order to allow a debate that should be deliberative, there is no guarantee that the debate will be deliberative. Therefore one can rightly raise some serious doubts about the possibility that ideal discursive conditions will ever be effective to such an extent that they could lead to a decision that could be defined as resulting from a deliberative process. The main argument to which we can honestly subscribe in defense of the deliberative project, and that keeps alive the hope that it still could have some concrete application, is that the deliberative values are not purely angelic abstraction in so far as these are immanent in each human being and are sometimes perceptible in the everyday political practices. This is what Habermas suggests when he says that deliberative democracy cannot be considered as a purely abstract theory because particles and fragments of deliberative democracy “are already incorporated in political practices, however distorted these may be” (Habermas 1996, 300). He adds that, from a comparative perspective, the deliberative theory is in any case much more connected to the social reality than the two dominating empirical sociological approaches to democracy that appeared after World War II—the economic theory and the systemic theory—which he considers to be “empirical folklore” that exclusively offers a disillusioning and cynical view of the political process.20 He, however, provides no tangible and empirical evidence of the existence, or even just the protoexistence, of forms of deliberative democracy. This vacuum of empirical evidences is probably the major weakness that the Habermassian as well as most of the deliberative theories are facing. It is therefore not a surprise that Habermas has very recently strongly appreciated and encouraged the efforts accomplished by researchers from around the world to operationalize and test the criteria and presuppositions of the deliberative democratic model in different contexts of discursive interaction (Habermas 2005, 2006). Such a demonstration of enthusiasm can be interpreted as a confession that his theory is in need of empirical investigation in order to survive and evolve. Another fundamental criticism against the deliberative democrats is related to the application of the inclusive criterion of deliberation according to which a fair and legitimate decision can emerge if all the opinions representing the diversity of the society are expressed. This implies that the political, organized group and “simple citizens” should have the


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opportunity and the willingness to express their opinions to influence the political agendas and the decisions that concern them directly.21 Young underlines that the promotion of inclusion is restricted by several barriers that are structural, theoretical, and psychological. The first barriers to the realization of a vast political inclusion are the socioeconomic inequalities: our societies contain structural, social, and economic inequalities (wealth, socioeconomic power, access to knowledge, etc.) that often operate to exclude or marginalize the voice and influence of some groups while magnifying the influence of others. To limit these undesirable consequences, Young is in favor of a militant but democratic promotion of inclusive democracy. This means that the deliberative democrats should take all the opportunities to promote inclusive and plural debates and to encourage political actors to justify their claims and actions in order to be accountable to their fellow citizens. Moreover, they should encourage enactment of measures that confront the ways in which the socially privileged sometimes exclude others from influencing political outcomes such as campaign financing regulation, lobbying regulation, corruption investigation, rules of hearings, procedures for public comments, and so on. In other words, the deliberative democratic promoters should be politically active in order to prevent forms of domination of some actors and to promote the inclusion of the multiplicity of actors. Finally, from a more theoretical perspective, she criticizes the deliberative democratic approaches that make it too narrow or exclusionary to aid in the task of deepening democracy in mass societies with structural injustices. In particular she criticizes the tendency of Habermas to promote forms of expression that are based on the articulateness of argumentation that privileges speech, which in turn is dispassionate, formal, and general. These types of expression are perceived as culturally specific since they favor highly educated people that are generally socially privileged members of society. On the opposite side she considers that in a deliberative democratic system, “none of us should be excluded or marginalized in situation of political discussion because we fail to express ourselves according to culturally specific norms of tone, grammar or diction” (Young 2000, 39). For this reason, she is in favor of promoting alternative modes of communication such as the “greeting,” “rhetoric,” and “narratives” in addition to making purely rational and dispassionate forms of argumentations. There are essentially three aspects that are open to discussion in the noble promotion of inclusion proposed by Young. First of all, her criticism concerning the discursive rational requirement defended by Habermas is to a large extent unfair, since it apparently ignores that the discursive normative requirements proposed by the German sociologist are not homogeneous at the different stages of the opinion- and decision-making

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processes. As we will see more in depth in the next chapter, Habermas recognizes and encourages at the level of the civil society and the general public a form of absolutely unconstrained interactions, that is, an interaction where all opinions and modes of expression are welcomed and promoted. It is in these deformalized and chaotic publics that the social inclusion of opinions takes place. It is just at the second step of this discursive itinerary, where public decisions are taken (for example parliamentary debates, judicial debates, etc.), that a more formalized and rational type of discussion is required. The second aspect that Young seems to ignore is that the requirement of a massive inclusion by deformalizing the debates can paradoxically lead to the opposite effect of what was initially planned. By that we suggest that precisely the acceptance of these more informal forms of expression can lead to the exclusion of people who value serious, nonemotional, and rational debate. This is a phenomenon that is commonly observed in some Web debates, where apparent informality, simplicity, unstructured reasoning, and freedom of speech have excluded people who search for more formal, rational, and structured debates. In other words a permissive form of deliberation on all levels of the opinion- and decision-making processes could end up recreating forms of deliberative exclusions among different categories of people on the basis of the modes of expression they prefer. Finally, the simple fact of accepting a greater variety of forms of expression seems to be largely insufficient for facing the political passivity that characterizes many categories of citizens in the advanced democratic societies. Even if different forms of expression are accepted in the public space, most of the citizens will not spontaneously participate in these public spaces for practical (time, work, family, etc.) or motivational reasons. This is all the more true if the issues that are debated are not directly related to their particularistic interests. How then could the political passivity be faced? Several experiences suggest that the civic passivity can only be overcome by increasing, even artificially, the incentives to participate. The most famous one is the deliberative opinion poll of James Fishkin (1995), where a representative sample of citizens—which includes people from different social conditions—are invited and paid to debate on some predefined topics. There are also examples of deliberative participation of the citizens that are worthwhile mentioning such as the participative budgeting, the consensus conferences, and the citizens juries.22 Also, at the European level, one should mention an interesting and innovative example of deliberative participation. This is the “European Citizens Consultation,” which was initiated by the foundation Roi Baudouin, and which to a large extent was financed by the European Commission through its plan D.23 From a deliberative perspective, these alternative


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modes of communication are interesting not only since they encourage the participation of citizens who otherwise would be passive but also because they limit the dangers of discursive exclusion, which, as we just saw, can derive from the promotion of forms of expression that are based on the articulateness of argumentation or, on the contrary, from the incommunicability deriving from the use of a multiplicity of forms of expressions. The first type of exclusion is avoided, whereas all forms of expression and types of reasoning, as long as they guarantee a minimal level of respect, are accepted. The second type of exclusion is strongly limited through the work of facilitators who would also play a role of mediators between the different ethnosocial groups that participate in the debates. 1.4

Concluding Remarks

This short reconstruction of the deliberative project has thrown light on both its positive aspects, that are numerous, and also its weaknesses, that are profound. On the positive side, the deliberative model of democracy is better adapted to plural and complex societies than other competing models—particularly the republican one; it is more likely to lead to collective decisions that are fair and democratic since the procedures it promotes are based on inclusion and justification, and favor a public-spirited mind of its participants; it is also more likely to lead to decisions that will be accepted by the greatest part of the population not only because these decisions are fairer but also because these are provisional; finally, it should increase, particularly in cases of strong disagreements, the possibility of reaching agreements and limit the dangers of social-group polarizations. On the negative side, however, we have argued that the deliberative project, being purely theoretical, is not necessarily adapted to the sociopolitical realities of the modern democracies. More particularly it suffers from a lack of empirical grounding that would allow it to explain how citizens and representatives could be sufficiently deliberative in their attitude and politically active. It is, in other words, not clear why citizens and politicians would be ready to ignore their interests and ambitions in favor of a deliberative attitude that implies a generous political activism and a discursive commitment to the common good. This absence of solid argumentation leads to the impression that the deliberative theory is based on noble intentions but does not provide convincing answers and propositions for their realization. Facing these difficulties, which are objectively important, we suggest that the subsistence, evolution, and progress of the deliberative project can only take place if it enters an empirical phase that would analyze primarily whether deliberation exists

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in real life politics and, secondly, to what extent the level of deliberation varies according to the contexts in which the debates take place. Only if these questions are answered can a deliberative model of democracy be built on solid foundations. The methods used for answering these questions and the operationalization of the deliberative criteria will be the object of the next chapter.

Chapter 2

Deliberative Democracy and Its Operationalization The operationalization of the deliberative theory, both on- and offline, demands awareness that the deliberative theory is composed of two levels of normative requirements, which often lead to a confusion about what deliberation is about and how it can be measured. There are, on the one hand, the deliberative norms that define the discursive rules that a political debate should follow, and on the other hand, there are the deliberative norms that define how these discursive norms should be applied at the different levels of the decision-making process. While there tends to be relatively widespread agreement among the deliberative theorists about what constitutes a deliberative form of political debate, there tends to be no agreement on how these ideal discursive criteria should be concretely applied at the different levels of the opinion- and decision-making process. As indicated by Thompson in a recent article, deliberative theory and, more particularly its empirical analysis, faces a structural problem, “which calls for moving beyond the study of isolated or one-time deliberative experiences and examining the relationship between deliberative and non-deliberative practices in the political system as a whole and over time” (2008, 500). The deliberative discursive criteria will be presented in detail in the first section by clarifying their definitions and the way these have been so far operationalized by the deliberative democrats. This review of the literature, essentially based on attempts to measure online forms of deliberation, reveals important differences concerning the choice of the deliberative criteria and strategies for operationalizing them. This will lead us to the elaboration of a table that synthesizes the methods that are considered to be the most appropriate for “measuring” each deliberative criterion. Then, in the second

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section, the main divergences of the deliberative theories concerning the way these discursive criteria should be applied at different levels of the decision-making process will be presented. We have identified four very different models of the deliberative standards (the globalizing model, the two-track model, the critical democratic model, and the impact model) that promote a divergent application of the discursive principles according to whether these concern the civil society, the institutional actors, or the private actors. We argue that the divergences and contradictions identified in the different models derive from an absence of empirical grounding. This justifies the choice of conducting an exploratory analysis that does not presuppose any discursive criteria or combination of discursive criteria in accordance with the public spaces, including those online, analyzed. 2.1

Deliberative Criteria and Their Operationalization

The link between the theory of deliberative democracy and the practice of online forums is the subject of an emerging body of literature. The research question concerning the relationship between online forums and theories of democracy and public space is a recurring one. Graham asks, “To what extent, do current online political forums correspond to the ideal notion of the public sphere advocated by Habermas and other deliberative democrats?” (2002, 9). Schneider tests “the hypothesis that the form of discourse fostered by computer mediated discussion provides opportunities to expand the informal zone of the public sphere” (1997, 1). Wilhelm asks, “How useful are these virtual sounding boards in enabling deliberation in the public sphere?” (1999, 154), and Jensen echoes, “Can [the Internet] contribute to strengthening democracy by creating new public spheres online?” (2003c, 1). Researchers that have operationalized this concept for empirical research do not, however, agree on the selection of criteria that constitute the idealized public sphere. Schneider lists “four dimensions that embody the spirit of the idealized public sphere: equality, diversity, reciprocity and quality” (1997). Jensen selects height variables: form, dialogue, openness, tone, argumentation, reciprocity, information, and agenda setting (2003b). Wilhelm uses a modified list of criteria for the virtual public sphere that are topography, topicality, inclusiveness, design, and deliberation (1999). Steenbergen et al. list the following criteria: participation, level of justification, content of justification, respect, and constructive politics (et al. 2003). Finally, Graham distinguishes between the process of understanding (consisting of rational-critical debate, reciprocity, reflexivity, and empathy), sincerity, equality, and freedom (2002).


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This absence of agreement on the selection of criteria reveals that the empirical attempts for evaluating the deliberativeness of the debates are still at a preliminary phase, a phase in which the researchers are encouraged to act as wizards who experiment with different methods and deliberative criteria in order to find the formula that would reveal the deliberativeness of debates. But these differences may also result from the fact that the deliberative empiricists are influenced by different deliberative theorists who do not give the same value and importance to each deliberative criterion. For example, an empirical research inspired by Iris Marion Young (2000), whose primary aim is to promote greater social justice, is likely to insist on the notion of inclusion within the democratic process in general and the deliberative process in particular. An empirical researcher that is inspired by the work of Amy Gutmann and Denis Thompson (2004), who are concerned with the multiplication of conflicting opinions and cultures and the resulting dangers of unsolvable disagreements (particularly on moral issues), is likely to insist on the criteria of respect. Similarly, an empirical investigation based on the theory of Habermas (1996), which particularly values the epistemic role of deliberation, is likely to observe whether the debates are rationally justified, and empirical investigation, inspired by the Dryzek’s (2000) post-Marxist deliberative theory, is more likely to observe whether debates tend to be curbed by economic and capitalist interests. Lastly, empirical research inspired by the theories of Sennet (1992) or Sunstein (2001) is more likely to test whether online public spaces have allowed for confrontation of a multiplicity of unexpected and spontaneous opinions. In sum, one could say that there are as many views concerning the preferential choice of the deliberative criteria as there are deliberative theorists. This divergence of views should not, however, be seen as an insuperable barrier to empirical research because the differences are generally not fundamental. Usually, most authors agree upon the basic conditions for deliberation, which are the ones that differentiate the deliberative model of democracy from other competing models (liberal, republican, aggregative). The differences are generally more subtle and concern, as we have just seen, the preferences that are given to certain discursive normative conditions in comparison to others. Ideally, the researchers should attempt to measure all normative criteria and if they do not, they should justify their choices and be aware that at the end of the process there is the risk that what they measured may be just the appearance of deliberation for, as we will see, some criteria are essential for evaluating deliberation, while some others can be interpreted only in the presence of other deliberative criteria. The following table offers an exhaustive list of the discursive deliberative criteria, of their meanings, and the way these have been operationalized

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Table 2.1 Deliberative criteria and their meanings Deliberative criteria Inclusion

Discursive equality

Reciprocity Justification Reflexivity

Empathy

Sincerity

Plurality

External impact

Meaning All those who are affected and/or interested by the issues under discussion should be able to participate either actively or passively. Participants should have equal opportunity to introduce and question any assertion whatsoever and to express attitudes, desires, and needs. Participants should listen and react to the comments formulated by other participants. The opinions and propositions should be accompanied by reasoned, accessible, and moral justifications. Participants should critically examine their values, assumptions, and interests, as well as the larger social context. Participants should be sensitive to other views and opinion, not only of those present during the debates. Participants must make a sincere effort to make known all relevant information and their true intentions, interests, needs, and desires. A deliberative context should be a context where a plurality of voices is heard even if these voices are critical to the dominant opinions/ideologies. A successful deliberative process should have an impact on the opinions formed and decisions taken outside the context of the debate.

so far. The deliberative criteria concern contextual factors (inclusion and discursive equality) and the deliberative attitude of the participants (reciprocity; justification; reflexivity; empathy; sincerity); and it looks at the outcome of the debates by observing whether the discussion space(s) being analyzed host divergent opinions (plurality) and whether they have an “external impact.” 2.1.1

Inclusion and Discursive Equality

The deliberative criterion of inclusion signifies that a democratic decision is fair and accountable only if all those affected by it are included in the process of discussion and decision making. Young adopts a limited definition of inclusion in stating that “affected” means that decisions and policies significantly condition a person’s options for action. The condition of discursive equality suggests that among the citizens who are included, “each participant [should have] an equal opportunity to


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introduce and question any assertion whatsoever and to express attitudes, desires, and needs” (Dahlberg 2004, 30). This condition cannot be met, however, unless freedom from domination is guaranteed, which implies that participants are politically equal—none of them being in a position of threatening their fellow debater or coercing them into accepting certain proposals or outcomes. A respect for such conditions should contribute to promoting public interests, on the one hand, because “participants can be confident that the results arise from good reason rather than from fear or force of false consensus” (Young 2000, 23) and, on the other hand, because they allow for maximum expression of interests, opinions, and perspectives that are relevant to the problems or issues for which a public is seeking solutions. The operationalization of the requirement of inclusion in an online environment implies an access to a computer with an Internet connection and the necessary information and communication technologies (ICT) skills to access an online forum and make a contribution. Research can report descriptive statistics concerning Internet access, PC ownership, etc., and can present survey data on Internet use and ICT skills. Furthermore, the moderation regime and/or technical architecture of an online forum as well as the requirements of registration and identification can make access easier or harder and can thus be reported as factors impacting the level of inclusion (Berdal 2004). The issue of discursive equality is more complex to operationalize. Graham states that previous studies have dealt with discursive equality from two slightly different perspectives: “equal voice” and “equal standing” (Graham 2002). The equal standing research has been mostly qualitative research that analyzed the discourses used by different groups of participants (men and women, professionals and beginners) to evaluate if some of them were dominant (and thus distracting from equality). The equal voice perspective has gained a lot of attention in previous research (Graham 2002; Schneider 1997; Jensen 2003a; Dumoulin 2003; Jankowski and Van Os, 2002; Hangemann 2002; Bentivegna 1998; Davis 1999; Coleman et al. 2002; Albrecht 2003). It analyses the “distribution of voice” in a conversation on the assumption that if only a small amount of participants contribute in a large proportion, they then dominate this debate. This idea of domination of conversation is operationalized in a “participant-contributions” statistic: the distribution of the amount of messages posted per participant is plotted on a Lorenz curve, often revealing that a small percentage of senders are responsible for a large percentage of posts and thus indicates that the conversation is dominated by one group of participants. More detailed study has also identified the institutional affiliation of the most active citizens (average

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citizens, members of parties and political associations, etc.) as well as the global perception of debate domination through a survey (Beierle 2002). Albrecht (2003) goes further into investigating the equality of voices by also scanning the behavior of the most frequent senders. He focuses on the contributions from the ten most active forum users and evaluates to what extent they overruled the debate with their personal issues and interests. This was done by comparing the average amount of their replies and threads initiated with the average amount of the other active-forum participants’ replies and threads initiated. The rationale of this measure is to consider whether the average number of messages sent by the most active participants encompasses more replies and less threads initiated than the average of all senders, which would suggest that they are not participating in the debates with the aim of dominating the debate. On the other hand, if the average amount of their messages constitutes more threads initiated and fewer replies than the global average, this would suggest that they are attempting to dominate the debate. These more detailed measurements are important in order to avoid the overly simple equation that the concentration of debates among a minority of people automatically implies that these same people will dominate the debates. This is in fact what Albrecht did not find. He found that on average, those in the active user-category tended to reply to messages more than the global average and, from a more qualitative perspective, he found that “the users acted as a sort of ‘senior’ participant in the debate, giving advice and providing other participants with an overview of the debate” (Albrecht 2003, 16). 2.1.2 Reciprocity

The element of reciprocity captures the degree to which a conversation is a “real discussion”. Graham defines reciprocity as “the taking in (listening, reading) of another’s claim or reason and giving a response” (2002, 45). For Schneider, reciprocity “refers to the notion that people are engaged in conversation with each other, and that their messages are reflected upon and discussed by others” (Schneider 1997, 74). Reciprocity can therefore be defined as a basic condition for deliberation. If citizens do not listen to each other and interact with them, there can be no deliberation, only monologue. In previous research, reciprocity has predominantly been operationalized in a content analysis that codes for the number of messages that constitutes a reply to a preceding message.1 Jensen uses the categories of “initiate” (a message initiates a new debate), “reply” (message is a reply to a previous message), and “monologue” (message is not really part of a debate),


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whereas Graham uses the comparable categories of “initial,” “response,” and “irrelevant” (such as for example crosspostings). Schneider employs a purely structural (quantitative) analysis. His analysis is also a “reply counting,” but the criteria for replies are purely structural: “A message is considered reciprocal to a previous message if it appears in the same thread within seven days of the previous message, or if it cites the message directly by message identification number” (Schneider 1997, 74). Hangemann (2002) proposes to gauge the reciprocity by combining this counting approach with a more qualitative approach by indicating the number of messages that contained explicit markers of “agreements” and “disagreements.” The strictly structural approach for measuring reciprocity as proposed by Schneider is obviously problematic as far it does not take into account the fact that a message in the same thread is not necessarily a reaction to the content of a precedent message. A message in a thread can just as easily be a monologue without any reference to preceding messages or the topic of the thread. But even a more refined approach based on reading the messages can be problematic insofar as the absence of genuine reciprocity does not necessarily mean a lack of deliberation and, inversely, the fact that a message is reciprocal does not necessarily imply that this message is deliberative. This leads us to the question of interpreting the findings. What does it mean when a thread, forum, or newsgroup’s level of reciprocity is low? It can mean that participants do not listen to each other but just state their opinions (and frustrations): this is the typical “dialogue of the deaf.” The absence of reciprocity may also reveal a lack of interest in the topics discussed. This is the interpretation proposed by Bentivegna: “A high number of original messages marks the difficulties of finding topics of common interest capable of starting discussion … On the contrary, a high number of answers indicates a strong interest for the topic of discussion” (1998, 5). Furthermore, the absence of reciprocity may reflect a general agreement about the topic discussed so that participants do not feel the need to react. Finally, a lack of reciprocity may also mean that (some) forum participants simply want to share information about a specific topic. The empirical analysis of the Radicali Italiani Web forum (see Chapter 6) reveals, for example, that several threads were implemented, generally by just one person, for informing the whole community about a specific topic such as, for example, the situation in Italian prisons. In sum, a lack of reciprocity can have a multiplicity of meanings. To reach a more refined evaluation of it, we suggest that no deliberative value should be given if it reflects an “absence of interest,” “tacit agreement,” and “sharing information,” and that a negative deliberative value should only be given when the lack of reciprocity discloses “an absence of disposition to listen to each other.”

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How to interpret a message that corresponds to our definition of reciprocity? Does it have a more uncontroversial deliberative status? Here as well, we privilege a nuanced interpretation of the presence of reciprocity that would take into account the scores realized by other deliberative criteria—in particular reflexivity, justification, and empathy. This control is needed, as a reciprocal message is not necessarily genuinely reciprocal. For example, a message can be reciprocal to the extent that it alludes to a precedent message, and at the same time disrespectful, poorly justified, and/or useless. In this case then, the deliberative value that is given to the reciprocal character of a message is annihilated by the nondeliberative content or intention of the message. 2.1.3 Justification

The criterion of justification implies that citizens owe one another justifications (or reason giving) for the mutually binding laws and public policies that they collectively enact. In order to allow for accountability and to bring about constructive and fair outcomes, the justification should be rational, intellectually accessible, and, according to some authors, based on moral fundaments. Justification should be rational and accessible because “a deliberative justification does not even get started if those to whom it is addressed cannot understand its essential content” (Gutmann & Thompson 2004, 4). Concretely, this means that there can be no deliberation if citizens appeal only to the authority of revelation or if their justification is based on complex arguments that only a restricted intellectual elite would understand. “Moral reason” implies that decision makers should justify policies by offering moral reasons. The requirement of moral reason distinguishes the deliberative approach from another common approach to public decision making that Gutmann and Thompson coined as “prudence.” Prudence corresponds to the decision-making process based on power relations and on bargaining. As they put it: “Prudence aims not at justice (or a moral outcome) but rather at a modus vivendi, in which self-interested citizens deal with their disagreements through various forms of bargaining. Their reasoning aims at striking the best bargain for themselves, regardless of moral considerations” (Gutmann & Thompson 2004, 148). In other words, prudential reasons and their outcomes reflect and exacerbate the decision makers’ balance of power.2 The realization of the principle of reciprocal justification includes a predisposition to mutual respect, which indicates that “citizens must recognize their obligation to justify to one another the laws and policies that govern their public life” (idem, 134).


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Previous research has used various content-analysis approaches that focused on the arguments that participants use to back up what they are saying. A basic method for revealing the presence of justification is to count the average number of words in each message. The fewer the average of words per message is, the less the forum is supposed to be argumentative and, vice versa, the greater the average number of words per message is, the more the forum is supposed to be argumentative (Coleman et al. 2002). A more precise method involves reading the messages and coding for the absence or presence of arguments (Wilhelm 1999; Tsaliki 2002; Jankowski and Van Os 2002). This counting can be realized for all the messages or, as proposed by Hangemann (2002), just for those posts containing “opinions” and “suggestions.” A more elaborate coding, that of Jensen (2003a, 2003b), makes a further distinction: when arguments are present they are either “internal” (based on personal viewpoints and values) or “external” (based on facts and figures). There is a normativity present in these codings, in that arguments are better than no arguments and arguments based on “objective” information are better than those based on personal experience. Another approach to justification operationalizes the Rawlsian construct of public reason and Habermas’s emphasis on the common good by focusing on the scope of arguments. Steenbergen et al. (2003) distinguish, in their content of justification category, between “neutral statements,” “statements concerning group interests,” and “statements referring to the common good.” Fuchs (2006) goes even further—determining the content of these messages. He is in favor of a strict determination of the political values that are promoted by the post by observing whether the message contains some political values and, in this case, by identifying the nature of the political values on the basis of an extensive list of defined political values. More in-depth approaches for measuring justification are also interested in the level of justification. Steenbergen et al.’s “level of justification” category does this by looking at the completeness of inferences (Steenbergen et al. 2003). Similarly, Fuchs (2006) measures “the complexity of arguments” by distinguishing four degrees of argumentation: “one dimensional message” (no reason for holding an opinion); “simple message” (one reason is communicated); “rather complex message” (two reasons are communicated); “complex message” (three or more reasons are communicated). With regard to the types of messages for which the level of justification should be assessed, we, like Fuchs, believe that it makes sense to measure the level of rational justification only for messages containing “opinions” and “suggestions.” These are after all the messages for which a justification is expected. We also believe that the “level of justification”

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should be assessed as far as it is a strong indicator of the complexity of the argumentation. However, its deliberative interpretation requires, similarly to reciprocity, a more qualitative and necessarily subjective evaluation, as an opinion does not necessarily need a detailed justification in order to be sufficiently justified. Concerning the content of the argumentation, Jensen’s distinction between internal and external arguments seems appropriate; however, what seems less appropriate is to associate this distinction with a deliberative score according to which a justification based on external argumentation would be more deliberative than a justification based on internal argumentation. In the previous chapter we argued that justifications based on personal experiences can be as useful as justifications based on facts for the promotion of deliberative values. Particularly in weak and informal public spaces, the presence of internal arguments (storytelling, testimony, etc.) can enrich the debates and allow citizens who feel uncomfortable with rational-critical debates to express themselves freely. Finally, the importance given to moral values, such as the common good, for justifying an opinion or proposition does not seem to be appropriate as far as their promotion can just be a rhetorical strategy for promoting personal or group interests. Such a measure would make sense only if we could be confident that the persons who refer to them are sincere. But sincerity is anything but certain in the political world, particularly when the interests at stake are important. Moreover, it seems to us that the moral character of deliberation is to be seen more as the outcome of the process that corresponds to the final decision than as an internal request of the process. 2.1.4 Reflexivity

One of the defining features of the deliberative process is that participants should be “open-minded.” This means that citizens or public officials must be ready and willing to change their opinions and preferences if they are sincerely persuaded that their initial opinions or preferences are incorrect or inappropriate for solving the collective problems. Dahlberg defines reflexivity as follows: “Participants critically examine their values, assumptions, and interests, as well as the larger social context” (2004, 29). Graham talks of “the rethinking of one’s own validity claims and arguments in light of another’s validity claim and/or argument” (2002, 46), and according to Jensen, research on reflexivity should try to “gain a reasonable interpretation of the extent interactions encourage selfcritique, and position alterations” (2003b, 361). Approaches based on content analysis attempt to find instances of reflexivity by just reading the messages that are sent. Jensen measures


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reflexivity with the variables “persuasion,” “progress,” and “radicalization” (Jensen 2003b) and grades the categories in order to construct a deliberative index.3 Persuasion is given the mark ⫹2, progress ⫹1, and radicalization ⫺2. Fuchs (2006) proposes a similar measure under the category “conflict resolution” and observes to what extent threads where conflict is present lead to an agreement. He distinguishes four general categories: “an agreement is reached”; “the conflict remains unsolved”; “there is no solution”; and “no conflict is present.” The rationale behind this measure is that a deliberative process of interaction should lead to conflict resolution when disagreements are present. Such indexes present a high risk of being meaningless as far as they suggest that, in order to be deliberative, a debate should necessarily lead to persuasion, change of opinions, or conflict resolution when in fact what the deliberative ideals requires is the “readiness” to change opinion if one is sincerely convinced by the arguments of someone else. This means, in other words, that an absence of opinion changes should not be interpreted as nondeliberative behavior if the concerned person is sincerely not convinced by the argument of someone else. More generally, the problem with the text analysis approaches described here is that they leave unaddressed important aspects of reflexivity. In a recent article, Dahlberg makes the fundamental observation that it “is relatively difficult to evaluate [reflexivity] because it is a largely internalized process” (2004, 33), taking place in the minds of individuals. This is certainly the case for a content analysis approach because “written communications may only show traces of such a subjective process” (idem, 33). A way out here is to adopt a broader methodological approach by including survey research as well as interviews with users. This would enable not only a more precise understanding of the (internalized) process of reflexivity but also a much broader one insofar as the “lurkers,”4 who are by far the most numerous users of the forum, will also be questioned on the way they have been influenced by the online debates. This is what Jensen drew by asking forum participants, via online survey, about several “internal effects” on their reflections about the topics of discussion (2003b). Similarly, the Hansard Society (2006), by using a methodology inspired by Fishkin, surveyed the participants on the evolution of their opinions before and after taking part in an experiment on e-consultation forums.5 Such a survey attempts to measure whether forum participation has led to changes in opinions and whether participants felt more informed about the topics that were discussed. An increased level of competence, even if it does not lead to a change of opinions, should also be considered a positive indicator of reflexivity. In sum, a meaningful measure of reflexivity requires the use of complementary research tools that include content analysis as well as surveys and,

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ideally, interviews with the users. The content analysis assesses apparent processes of reflexivity while the surveys and the interviews gauge the more internal processes of reflexivity. 2.1.5 Empathy

The criterion of empathy can be defined as “the extent participants take into account and are sensitive to other participants and positions, not only those immediately present in the forum” (Dahlberg 2004, 33). Empathy is alongside the criterion of sincerity, a cardinal indicator of deliberation, since all others derive more or less directly from it. Concretely, this means that if one is sincerely concerned by the opinions and preoccupations of his fellow citizens, he will be more eager to interact with them (reciprocity), to justify his opinions (justification), and to change his mind if sincerely convinced by an argument (reflexivity). The criterion of empathy also implies that citizens should discuss collective problems with the aim to reach an agreement. This does not mean that this agreement will ever be reached and this is not what realist deliberative theorists would require, since they admit it is not always possible. What is requested is that participants must be aiming to reach agreement to enter. Such a predisposition is considered to be fundamental since “only if participants believe that some kind of agreement among them is possible in principle can they in good faith trust one another to listen and aim to persuade one another” (Young 2000, 24). Since these criteria aim at the debaters’ internal disposition, a proclivity for both considering others’ opinions and agreement seeking, their measurement is complex and necessarily limited. Most of the existing attempts to measure it are based on content analysis. Such approaches generally try to grasp their direct manifestations by focusing on the presence/absence of “respectful listening” and of “ongoing character of dialogue with difference.” Respectful listening moves us into the realm of respect and its opposite, disrespect. Most of the studies have applied content analysis to look for explicit instances where respect is absent (for example, Jankowski & Van Os 2002; Jensen 2003b; Beierle 2002; Coleman et al. 2002; Bentivegna 1998). It is assumed that lesser instances of disrespect imply an increase in deliberativeness. Steenbergen et al. code for respect rather elaborately, with categories for “respect for groups,” “respect for the demands of others,” and “respect for the counterarguments of others” (Steenbergen et al. 2003). With this focus on disrespect, the construct of respectful listening, let alone that of empathy, has not been researched in its entirety. For a more general appreciation, Dahlberg suggests that we look for “participants seeking to understand the other


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through reflecting positions, asking for clarification, acknowledging the rights of all to be heard, and even putting forward positions that are not one’s own to enable broader reflection” (Dahlberg 2004, 34). Such a very progressive level of understanding can only be gauged with a qualitative approach and an in-depth reading of messages, which obviously is time consuming and can lead to very subjective interpretations. It is also the case that self-reporting via surveys and interviews would be useful to have a more profound understanding of the willingness of participants to be empathetic with the other discussants. Berdal (2004) assessed the level of respect by asking the users and the webmaster “whether some postings sabotage the discussion.” For the empirical analysis of the Italian Radicals, we investigated the level of respect of the forum by interviewing the users and webmasters and used questions that were integrated into an online survey sent to all users of the forum. Attempts to measure the criteria of empathy also took place by measuring the ongoing character of a debate. Research has focused on the structure of discussion threads (Schneider 1997; Wilhelm 1999). The dubious rationale of this measurement is that the length and number of the threads reveal the extent to which participants have adopted a deliberative attitude. In his analysis Wilhelm codes for “time” (the mean time length of a thread in days) and “thread” (the mean number of threads per day) (Wilhelm 1999). The thread is taken as a carrier of conversation, and the amount and duration of threads are criteria for the ongoing character of discussions. Another measurement consists of counting the number of discussants that have participated in the forum only once (have only sent one message), referred to as the “one-timer effect” (Graham 2002). The rationale of this measurement is that conversations will not be ongoing if many participants just “say” something once and then leave. In reality both measurements are problematic for measuring the ongoing character of the debates. They are simply structural measurements of the debates’ dynamic, which are interesting per se, but do not say much about the quality of the debates, not to mention the deliberative attitude of the participants. In sum, it seems that the best way to measure the criteria of empathy and search for agreement is through content analysis (by counting the cases of disrespect) and by directly asking these questions to the users through surveys and interviews. Additionally, the presence of empathy can also be estimated in a deductive way by observing the scores of the other deliberative criteria as they are generally positively correlated with them. If we find that the levels of reflexivity, justification, and sincerity are high in a forum, then it is likely that this signifies that participants are sensitive to the opinions of others and willing to reach a consensus.

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2.1.6 Sincerity

The requirement of sincerity implies that “for understanding and rational assessment of positions to be possible, discursive participants must make a sincere effort to make known all relevant information and their true intentions, interests, needs, and desires” (Dahlberg 2004, 30). Communicative action requires sincerity and banishes rhetorical forms of speech to the realm of strategic action. Sincerity is the deliberative criterion that is the most poorly empirically investigated because it is also the most difficult to grasp. Textual analysis approaches, looking for sincerity in online conversations, have mostly focused on hints of the absence of sincerity. Graham approaches “non-sincerity (insincerity)” in an indirect manner, looking for instances where forum participants accuse other participants of not being sincere. He acknowledges that he is thus in fact measuring insincerity as perceived by other participants but argues that it is the perception of sincerity, which has the greatest impact on the process of deliberation. Dahlberg suggests a more comprehensive approach with a qualitative analysis based on “consistency in speech, consistency in speech and action, and coherence” (Chambers 1996, cited in Dahlberg 2002, 34). An inductive approach could look for instances where participants’ inconsistencies are exposed by other participants or could look for inconsistencies in speech and/or actions themselves. Finally, a more refined measurement of sincerity could be based on forum participants’s self-reporting (passive or active) using interviews and survey analysis. It is, however, unlikely that participants who were not sincere in the debates will become sincere when responding to an interview or survey. In sum, the existing measurements of sincerity are limited and weak. The textual analysis approach, which searches for instances of apparent insincerity, is insufficient since absence of sincerity is usually not present in the text itself. On the other hand, the survey analysis and interviews that attempt to measure the “invisible” quality of sincerity are problematic insofar as they are just based on a subjective and probably flawed perception of sincerity. Should we then ignore the criterion of sincerity as most of the empirical research does? We think that the reply to this question should clearly be no even if the combined measurements that are based on content analysis, surveys, interviews, and participant observation provide just some sparse and vague indication of its presence. As mentioned before, the criterion of sincerity with the one of empathy together form a cardinal evaluative criterion of deliberation. This means that if sincerity is absent a debate cannot be considered as deliberative even if all the other deliberative criteria score high.


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2.1.7 Plurality

The criterion of plurality aims to evaluate whether an online discussion space hosts different and divergent opinions. It is a fundamental criterion for evaluating how successful a debate has been in hosting and confronting all the relevant opinions on a specific topic. Tsaliki defines plurality as “the extent to which postings demonstrate a certain political affiliation in the forum of supporting a person, an argument, an ideology or issue.” (Tsaliki 2002, 98). She proposes three categories: (1) Affiliation, which refers to postings that show solidarity with a person, platform, ideology, or argument; (2) Non-affiliation, which involves postings that do not show any sign of solidarity; and (3) Disaffiliation, which includes messages that display negativity or opposition toward a person, platform, ideology, or argument. She, however, agrees that these measures are “not foolproof,” but she believes that “it can produce a rough estimate of ingroup homogeneity” (idem, 99). Dumoulin (2003) and Wilhelm (1999) propose a similar measure to evaluate “to what degree the totality of the messages contained in the forum are affiliated to a political ideology” (Dumoulin 2003, 146). They distinguish four levels of political affiliation that allow for the measurement of “message diversity” (4 ⫽ strong affiliation; 3 ⫽ weak affiliation; 2 ⫽ neutral affiliation; 1 ⫽ slight opposition; 0 ⫽ strong opposition). Concretely, the results of the different messages are summed across the forum and then averaged in order to reach a global measure of plurality for the forum. A more exploratory coding, that of Fuchs (2006), distinguishes the intensity of affiliations independently from the context of the debate: (1) Strong affiliation, where the author identifies positively at least twice with at least one idea that is characteristic of a specific political ideology or (s)he directly expresses feelings of identification that belong to certain ideologies or parties; (2) Moderate affiliation, where the author identifies positively once with an idea that is characteristic of a specific political ideology; and (3) No affiliation, where the author avoids a clear and direct affiliation. When strong or moderate affiliation is noted, the type of affiliation is identified by observing to “which political camp and side the affiliations expressed belong or come closest” (idem, 11). He distinguishes and defines the following ideologies: Communists/Marxists, Social/Democratic, Greens, Liberals, Conservatives, Extreme Right. Such an in-depth measurement is interesting as far as it assesses the variety and the intensity of the affiliations that are present in a discussion space and does not imply that a discussion space is dominated by specific and precise political ideology on the basis of which the plurality of the forum should be assessed. This is the reason why Fuchs’ approach is preferable to those of Tsaliki, Dumoulin, and Wilhelm.

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A complementary strategy for evaluating the plurality of a forum is to observe the sociodemographic profile of the (passive and active) users of the online debates. The investigations that are exclusively based on content analysis tend to focus exclusively on the gender divide by using names as a marker (Davis 1999; Coleman et al. 2002). Investigations that made the effort of carrying out (online) surveys allow us to reach a better understanding of the plurality of the forum users by focusing on the sociodemographic profiles (gender, age, education, occupation) and their level of political involvement, their familiarity with Internet use, as well as their institutional affiliation (Davis 2005; Jensen 2003b; Beierle 2002). The results of these surveys should, however, be carefully assessed since the sociodemographic homogeneity of a public does not necessarily imply that the debates will be homogeneous. This is suggested not only by the description Habermas makes of the bourgeois salons of the eighteenth century, but also by several online political forums such as that of the Radicali Italiani, which will be analyzed later on (Chapter 6). In order to avoid such flaws, a method that combines content analysis with survey analysis is clearly recommended. 2.1.8 External Impact

The external impact implies that a successful deliberative process should have an impact on debates and the decisions taking place outside the online forum. While the internal impact of deliberation is generally evaluated through the criterion of reflexivity, not much is generally said about the external impact of the online debates. Jensen (2003a) measures the external impact by assessing the presence of explicit signs that a sender is trying to extend discussions with an external agenda. He counts instances where participants attempt “to attract the attention of a politician,” “propose political actions,” or “refer to external effect of a discussion.” Hangemann (2002) and Coleman et al. (2002) observe whether influential political personalities participate on a regular basis in the forums, for example, members of Parliament. Berdal (2004) proposes a more detailed mode to evaluate the external impact: not only does he assess whether influential personalities participate in the forum or not, he also investigates whether the users of the forum participate in several other Web forums. The rationale behind this measure is that the opinions will spread among the online forums and therefore enrich the general public opinion and influence the strong public sphere. In the same vein, Beierle (2002) measures the external impact by asking participants whether the participation in the forum led to “networking among the participants” and if they felt that the forum


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is likely to have “an influence on the decision-making process.” A final evaluation of external impact consists of observing—particularly for discursive e-consultation experiences—to what extent suggestions coming from the forum were considered in the final drafts of policy proposals and whether participation in the forum led to more positive opinions of the institutions that hosted the forum (Beierle 2002; Coleman et al. 2002; Hansard Society 2006). As suggested by these different measurements, the evaluation of the external impact should be adapted to the contexts in which the forum takes place. What we mean is that one cannot adopt the same deliberative standards and evaluative methods for a debate taking place on, for example, a simple blog or newsgroup or a debate that would be organized by a parliamentary commission for consultation purposes. It goes without saying that the requirements of external impact should be a more demanding e-consultation debate than for a blog debate for which the external impact is not a priority. 2.1.9 Summary and Comments

The variety of existing strategies and the many doubts that still exist for measuring deliberation suggest that the empirical investigation of deliberation is still a very exploratory research field. While it is impossible to propose a methodology that will perfectly measure the level of deliberation of the multiplicity of existing discussion spaces, the review of methodology suggests that a fairly valid measurement of deliberation can be achieved by combining different methods that allow us to measure the visible presence of deliberation (content analysis) as well as the internal presence of deliberation (surveys, interviews) and that enable a qualitative interpretation of the deliberative scores on the basis of the discursive context. The methodological review also reveals the tempting danger of ignoring criteria for which narrowly defined and measurable indicators cannot be found, such as sincerity and empathy. We consider that such deadlocks should be avoided or at least clearly noted since these are fundamental deliberative criteria and their nonconsideration could lead, as Dahlberg mentions it, to “a serious loss of meaning” (Dahlberg 2004, 31). Before entering into the second phase of this initial methodological review, table 2.2 provides a summary of the methodological choices that are considered the most appropriate for evaluating the different normative criteria of deliberation. It obviously should not be considered as a restrictive list, and its application should be adapted to the different contexts in which deliberation is assessed.

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Table 2.2 Deliberative criteria and their operationalization Inclusion

Discursive equality

Reciprocity

Justification

Reflexivity

Empathy

The criterion of “inclusion” should be assessed by observing, on the one hand, the ease of access to the online forum on the basis of connectivity and ICT skills and, on the other hand, by analyzing whether the discursive rules (moderation, registration, identification) are not perceived as barriers to promoting inclusive participation. The criterion of discursive equality has been most convincingly assessed by identifying the phenomenon of discursive concentration and by analyzing whether this concentration leads to a control of the debate. The level of reciprocity should be measured through content analysis by assessing, at a basic level, the proportion of postings that are part of a thread versus the ones that initiate a thread and, at a more in-depth level, by measuring the extent to which postings take into consideration arguments and opinions of a precedent posting. The deliberative values that are given to reciprocity should be carefully assessed through a qualitative evaluation of the messages, that is, an evaluation that also takes into consideration the scores obtained for the other deliberative criteria (justification, reflexivity, ideal role taking). The extent to which messages in an online debate are rationally justified should be measured using content analysis. One should assess the extent to which the opinions and suggestions expressed in the debates are justified by observing whether the opinions and suggestions that are expressed in a forum are (or not) justified (J1) and how complex the justifications are (J2). A more in-depth evaluation of justification should also focus on the content of the justification by observing whether the justification’s arguments are either internal (based on personal viewpoints and values) or external (based on facts and figures). As for reciprocity, the deliberative evaluation of the “level” of rational justification implies a necessarily subjective and contextual appreciation of whether an opinion is sufficiently justified. A meaningful measure of reflexivity requires the use of complementary research tools that include content analysis as well surveys and, ideally, user interviews. The content analysis assesses apparent cases of reflexivity by notifying visible instances of opinion changes or conflict resolutions while the surveys and the interviews gauge more internal processes of reflexivity by directly asking the active and passive users of the forum whether they changed their opinions and/or felt more informed after participating in the online forum. The criterion of empathy should be measured through content analysis (by counting the cases of disrespect) and by directly raising the question to the users via surveys and interviews. Additionally, the presence of empathy can also be estimated in a deductive way by observing the “scores” of the other deliberative criteria as they are generally positively correlated with the score of empathy. If we find in a forum that the levels of reflexivity, rationality, and sincerity are high, then it is very likely that the level of empathy will be high. (Continued )


Table 2.2

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(Continued )

Sincerity

Plurality

External impact

It has been highlighted that the criterion of sincerity is certainly the most complex one to measure. It should nevertheless be assessed insofar as it is a cardinal deliberation criterion. Certain measurements based on content analysis allow us to assess apparent traces of the absence of sincerity while questions raised by survey analysis and interviews reveal the perception of the presence and intensity of (in)sincerity by the users themselves. The plurality of an online debate can be efficiently evaluated by the combination of content analysis and (online) survey analysis. The content analysis determines, on the one hand, the degree to which the debates refer to political ideologies and, on the other hand, whether any political ideology dominates the debate. The survey analysis assesses the forum users’ diversity by focusing on sociodemographic profiles (gender, age, education, occupation) and their political involvement and affiliation as well as their familiarity with the use of the Internet. It is argued that the sociodemographic profile of the active users of the forum should be considered as just an indicator of the plurality of the messages contained in the forum. Are there explicit signs of extension of the discussion to an external agenda? Do influential political personalities participate in the forums? Do users participate in other discussion spaces? Did users create new contacts after participating in the forum? Did, for example in the case of e-consultation forum, the debates lead to any concrete outcomes? These correspond to questions that have been operationalized through content analysis and surveys in order to evaluate the external impact of specific discussion spaces. The standards and methods for measuring the external impact by the types and objectives of the online debates that are analysed.

2.2 Models of Deliberative Democracy and Their Methodological Implications The question of applying the discursive deliberative criteria within the democratic process is probably one of the most controversial issues of the deliberative theory. This is obviously problematic for conducting empirical research since the theory does not indicate in an unambiguous way at which level of the opinion- and decision-making process the ideal discursive conditions should be realized in order to promote a deliberative outcome. There are at least four different views with respect to the concrete application of the deliberative precepts. Not too far removed from the deliberative democrats who defend a globalizing approach by considering that deliberative procedures should be applied to any social and political associations,6 there are authors who consider that the deliberative discursive requirements should be more or less extended to state institutions, to civil society associations, and to private associations.

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Among them, it is possible to distinguish three major trends. The first one, defended by Habermas (1996) in “Between Fact and Norms,” considers that the deliberative discursive requirements should be limited to core political state institutions. The second one, defended by Gutmann and Thompson (2004), considers that they should be extended to the civil society and private associations as far as their influence spreads over the latter. Finally, according to Dryzek (2000), the discursive requirements can and should take place exclusively within civil society. These three positions will be further analyzed in order to clarify their specificities and to detect the reasons explaining why scholars who claim to belong to the same theoretical school can defend such discrepant views concerning the realization of the deliberative project. We will conclude this section by indicating the theoretical implications of these contradictory views and, from a methodological perspective, how these models should be referred to during the empirical investigation process. 2.2.1 Presentation of the Different Models of Deliberative Democracy

Habermas (1996, 2002) considers that a strict observance of discursive criteria should be required only in those institutions that are core structures of a constitutionally organized democracy.7 He offers two major reasons for justifying the limitation of deliberation to the core constitutional democratic institutions. The first one is a reason of feasibility. As he puts it: “If deliberative politics is supposed to be inflated into a structure shaping the totally of society, then the discursive model of sociation expected in the legal system would have to expand into a selforganization of society and penetrate the latter’s complexity as a whole. This is impossible” (Habermas 1996, 305). This is unfeasible not only for practical reasons but also because associations outside the core state institutions are “more vulnerable to the repressive and exclusionary effects of unequally distributed social power, structural violence, and systematically distorted communication than are the institutionalized public sphere of parliamentary bodies” (idem, 308). The second reason finds its roots in Habermas’s “two-track model of democracy,” which requires that civil society should remain substantially unstructured to allow free will-formation and the emergence of new social issues. According to this view, a “democratically constituted opinion- and will- formation depends on the supply of informal public opinions that, ideally, develop in structures of an unsubverted political public sphere. The informal public sphere, must for its part, enjoy the support of a societal basis in which equal rights of citizenship have become socially effective” (idem, 308).


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For the record, the two-track model of Habermas promotes a dynamic political process according to which the deliberative project is to be achieved as a result of the interactions of, on the one hand, the strong publics (in particular parliament), where decisions are taken, and, on the other hand, the weak publics (in particular civil society), where new issues of public relevance can arise. The strong publics are procedurally structured bodies in order to be contexts of justification with the objective of “structuring opinion- and will- formation process with a view to the cooperative solution of practical questions, including the negotiation of fair compromises” (Habermas 1996, 307). On the opposite side, the weak publics are procedurally unstructured arenas that correspond to contexts of discovery that allow the formation and the emergence of new social issues.8 Amid these two publics is the general public that is dominated by the mass media (newspapers, television, radios) where the opinions and demands of the weak public and the opinions and decisions of the strong publics are presented and debated. In order to promote the appearance of a critical and informed public opinion, the media should be independent using self-regulation procedures and should give visibility without any distortion to the opinions coming from the different publics, in particular the weak ones (civil society), which have lesser public and political influence (Habermas, 2006). Dryzek (2000) adopts a symmetrically opposite position than the one of Habermas. By defending the “critical deliberative democracy,” he considers that the deliberative discursive requirements can and should take place only outside the state structures, which are the structures that are legally authorized to make binding decisions on behalf of a society. Dryzek believes that “authentic deliberation”9 cannot take place within state institutions because they are subject to major constraints that are mostly related “to the economic system within which the state must operate, and are intensified with free trade and capital mobility” (Dryzek 2000, 8). For this reason he considers that Habermas’ approach, which requires that deliberative debates can and should take place only within the state institutions, is illusionary: Liberal democrats might argue that there is plenty of scope for increased democratic authenticity within the confines of liberal state; I would argue there is not. For this state is increasingly subject to the constraints imposed by the transnational capitalist political economy … This imperative conditions policy-making, for democratic influence on policy-making introduces a dangerous elements of indeterminacy, and so becomes increasingly curtailed. Public officials under sway of such imperatives are highly constrained when it comes to the terms of the arguments they can accept; it is very hard for deliberation to reach them Dryzek 2000, 29

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According to Dryzek, the most important alternative location for deliberation is civil society, because “a flourishing civil society provides both the resource for future democratization of the state and a check against the reversal of state’s democratic commitments” (Dryzek 2000, 171). Civil society is also considered to allow that deliberative debates take place since it is supposed to be less subject to external forms of constraint. As far as political impact is concerned, Dryzek is confident that this emphasis on civil society does not confine deliberative democracy to a powerless realm, since the outcome of these deliberations can enter into the public sphere in order to contribute to forming a public opinion that can be translated into administrative power. A less restrictive and more flexible approach, which we coined the “impact model,” is the one defended by Gutmann and Thompson (2004). They consider that the discursive requirements should apply not only to state structures but also to civil society associations if the decisions they take have a clear and binding political impact and if their mission is particularly important for the nation. They also consider that deliberative procedures should be extended to institutions such as corporations, since these are institutions that affect citizens’ basic liberties. On the opposite side, they argue that “the less the aims of institutions and associations in civil society coincide with those of ordinary politics, the less subject they should be to the force of deliberative principles” (Gutmann & Thompson 2004, 34–35). In sum, such an approach differs essentially from the two previous ones for it makes an abstraction of the feasibility of applying the deliberative criteria in different contexts and focuses just on the importance of decisions that are taken for applying (or not) the deliberative discursive criteria. This signifies that while they are sensitive to Habermas’ argument stating that civil society must remain a free and creative space of socialization, they still believe it must be a responsible space of interaction. 2.2.2

Theoretical and Methodological Implications

These different conceptions concerning the application of the ideal deliberative procedures in the real life are obviously problematic not only for constructing and defending a coherent model of deliberative democracy but also for elaborating a method that allows investigating and empirically evaluating existing public spaces. From a general perspective, one should try to explain how it is possible that among the deliberative democrats, who supposedly share the same ideals of democracy and justice, there can exist such a divergence of views for carrying out the same project. From a methodological perspective, the major question is how to operationalize and test a model where constitutive elements are so uncertain


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and controversial. A last, more general, question is whether the deliberative model of democracy could become more coherent and efficient through the inputs of findings resulting from the empirical analysis. The absence of agreement concerning the application of deliberative discursive norms probably reflects some divergent views concerning the way a democratic process should work, but more importantly it confirms, according to us, that the deliberative democratic model significantly lacks empirical evidence on which it could be built. The above-mentioned deliberative models are built either without any empirical investigation or, worse, on empirical evidence that is insufficient and partially selected. This is a flaw that is particularly apparent in the Habermas and Dryzek models, which, more than the others, have attempted to justify their choice empirically. The Habermassian two-track model supposes for instance that parliaments would be particularly adapted to host deliberative debates, as their procedures would be conducive to carrying out rational-critical debates. On the opposite side, it assumes that the weak publics (civil society in particular) are not conducive to rational debates for they would be particularly prone to violence, distorted communication, and unequal distribution of power. Intriguingly, Dryzek issues exactly the opposite empirical suppositions. His “critical model” suggests that deliberation cannot take place in strong publics (which include parliament) since they would be perverted by political and economic external factors, and he considers that authentic deliberation can take place only in civil society associations that are free from any external perverting intrusions. The problem is that these contradictory statements are not empirically confirmed, neither for Habermas nor for Dryzek. If one considers, for example, Habermas’ empirical assumption, it is unclear why the debates taking place within the parliament would be more deliberative than debates taking place outside the state structures. It may well be that justification would be more detailed, but what about the other deliberative criteria? What about the less visible, but nevertheless fundamental, deliberative criteria concerning the attitude of the participants such as the criteria of sincerity and empathy? Can we not suppose that the political discipline and the economic pressure that dominates the legislative debates tend to favor more strategic debates, rather than deliberative ones?10 Similarly, it remains unclear how it is possible to confirm that weak publics are particularly prone to violence, distorted communication, and unequal distribution of power without bringing any evidence of it. There is a great variety of weak publics and certainly many of them do not correspond to Habermas’ simplistic description of them. Such empirical weaknesses, also present in the theory of Dryzek, further

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confirm that the deliberative project cannot evolve unless it enters into an empirical phase that would allow testing the assumptions of many political theorists. This leads us to our second core question, namely—how can we develop a valid method to evaluate the deliberativeness of online public spaces, and more generally all public spaces, if the existing models are so divergent and poorly justified? The strategy we propose here is rather simple. We consider that no deliberative model should be chosen in principle as a model of reference and, consequently, that the deliberativeness of public spaces should be evaluated on the basis of the same criteria independently of whether the debates take place in the arena of parliament, media, or civil society. This largely exploratory approach reflects the conviction that the only valid question that can be raised at this stage of the research is not so much where deliberation should take place, but where it can take place. Such empirical efforts, have already been initiated for analyzing the level of public deliberation within the parliament (Steiner et al. 2004), for analyzing the level of deliberation in everyday talk (Conover & Searing 2005), and for measuring the level of deliberation in experimental contexts that specifically aim to favor a qualitative opinion formation through the use of different deliberative methods (Fishkin 1995; Fishkin & Luskin 2005). Only in the second phase, after empirically testing the deliberative potential of the different political actors and contexts, is it legitimate to conceptualize models of deliberative democracy that can fit to real-life politics. As indicated by Thompson in a recent article dealing with the relation between theoretical and empirical research on deliberative democracy: “The key question … is what are the most effective and desirable relationships among various bodies that operate within the structure of deliberative democracy—those designed to deliberate, as well as those constituted to decide in other ways” (Thompson 2008, 516). 2.3

Concluding Remarks

So far we have argued that the deliberative model of democracy is in need of empirical evidence in order to become more credible and applicable to real-life politics. This empirical investigation should focus on three major objectives. From a theoretical perspective it should prove that the deliberative theory is a viable theory by revealing, on the one hand, that citizens and representatives can in certain circumstances adopt a deliberative attitude and, on the other hand, that the existing social and political structures are potentially adapted to carrying out the deliberative project. Second, the empirical investigation should make a comparative analysis


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of the different contexts of opinion- and will- formation (strong publics, general publics, weak publics, experimental publics) for revealing how the deliberativeness of debates varies according to the context in which they take place. Finally, the results obtained from these comparative studies should lead to the elaboration of a more robust model of deliberative democracy, in which its concrete feasibility could be confirmed by empirical evidence. This corresponds precisely to the research course that will be followed in this investigation. Can virtual public spaces (newsgroups, Web forums, or experimental forums) host deliberative debates? How does the deliberativeness of online debates vary according to the contexts in which they take place? Other more specific research questions that are inspired by the sociohistorical analysis that Habermas and Sennet carried out on the evolution of public spaces will also be further examined. The first is whether online debates could foster debates that are spontaneous and plural as were, according to Sennet, the public spaces of the eighteenth century, and the second is whether the virtual public spaces could increase the level of deliberation of existing political associations that tend to dominate the political debates.


Chapter 3

Extension of Online Political Debates At the end of the 1990s, when research on the potential impact of the online debates first took place, a common mistake was to analyze one or a limited number of online forums and to derive from these findings broad (generally negative) conclusions about how an extension of the usage of online political debates could influence the political process. It has become clear that such an approach, which supposes that all the online public spaces would share the same deliberative characteristics, is flawed. Whether the Web-debates could increase the deliberative character of our democracies requires to take into consideration three major factors: (1) the importance of the phenomenon by assessing the number and characteristics of citizens who debate online for political matters; (2) the nature of the actors hosting the online political debates, for this may influence the discursive quality of the Web-debates; and (3) the contextual factors (moderation policy, ideology, impact of the forum, characteristics of participants, etc.) that may influence the deliberativeness of the online debates. The contextual factors will be analyzed in the next chapters. In this chapter, we will look at two other factors, namely, the usage and the supply of online political forums. An assessment of the usage of the online political forums is important, for if we discover that this is low and will continue to be so, this would mean that the online debates are just a fashionable phenomenon of which everybody talks but nobody practices. On the contrary, if the participation is important, inclusive, and varied, this could signify that the Internet could become a new arena for debates that could accelerate the flourishing of deliberative values at the different levels of the opinion- and decision-making processes. In the first section the usage of the online political forums will be gauged by

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looking at broad surveys that quantify the participation of EU and U.S. citizens according to the type of debates (general versus political) and the sociodemographic categories of users (age, gender, political activism, ICTs skills, etc.). The second aspect, namely, the assessment of the entities hosting the online public spaces, is important, for the characteristics of the entities that host the Web debates are, as we will see in the next chapters, likely to influence their impact and deliberativeness. Concretely, this means that if we discover that the political debates are in the majority hosted by entities that have no political influence and that do not foster deliberative debates, this would signify that the usage of the online forums does not improve the deliberativeness of the political process. In contrast, if the political debates are hosted in their majority by entities that have a direct (or indirect) political impact and foster a deliberative form of debates, this would signify that they could contribute to reinforcing the deliberativeness of the political process. The present research is a first, limited attempt to map the entities that host online political debates. It looks and compares several empirical studies that have measured the way parliaments, local authorities, and political parties have implemented on their Web sites possibilities for discursive interactions. The inferences that can be drawn from this initial investigation are inevitably limited for it misses the analysis of the Web-discursive offerings of other important political actors such as traditional media (TV, radio, newspaper, weekly newspapers), civil society associations (trade unions, private or public civic associations, NGOs, ephemeral issue oriented associations, etc.), and new Web-sharing media (YouTube, political or private blogs, Facebook, etc.). It is nevertheless interesting per se for it offers a first broad comparative analysis of the Web discursive offer of three major actors of the political process. 3.1

Web-discussion Usage

The extent to which citizens participate in online political debates is a question that is largely underanalyzed for the surveys measuring it are still very rare. At this early stage of the research it is possible to envisage two broad scenarios. In favor of the “Web-discursive scenario,” one can argue that citizens and politicians should increasingly debate online since these new possibilities of interactions enormously facilitate communication and allow discussions about an almost infinite variety of topics. Also, by preserving a distance with the other interlocutors—it is a written communication based on an interposed screen behind which one can generally hide one’s real identity—it can encourage people who are too shy, or, in

Extension of Online Political Debates

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Sennet’s words, “obsessed by the self-realization,” to participate. At the same time there are good reasons to believe that the Web discursive scenario is based on an overoptimistic view of the participative and deliberative potential of the Web. The digital divide based on access to a connection is still a reality and the digital divide based on technical competence, in particular for the elderly, is likely to be still strongly pronounced. Moreover, the online debates are still considered by many citizens, practitioners, and scholars as “cheap talk” for they are perceived to be chaotic, irresponsible, and unlikely to have any concrete political impact. Finally, there are still numerous people who prefer avoiding discussion online for they consider that online debates will never replace the “authentic” forms of face-to-face debates. In the present section, the plausibility of the two scenarios is evaluated and discussed on the basis of recent surveys describing the extent to which the U.S. and the EU populations use the Web to debate. We will first analyze the general (i.e. not specifically political) use of the online debates by referring to a survey conducted on the citizens of the 15 EU member states (Flash EB 135 2002). The political use of the online debates is then analyzed, on the one hand, during the electoral period and, on the other hand, among young people. The usage of online debates during the electoral period is assessed on the basis of surveys concerning the U.S. midterm elections of 2006 (PEW 2007) and the 2007 presidential elections in France (IFOP 2007). The use of the online forum by the young generation is based on another recent European survey (Flash EB 202 2007) that reveals how young citizens of the 27 EU member states use and perceive the Internet for their leisure and political activities. 3.1.1

Web Discussion in General: A European Snapshot

As far as the private usage of the online debates is concerned, a European survey conducted in November 2002 (Flash EB 135 2002) among the citizens of 15 EU member states reveals that almost one Internet user in four (24 percent) declared that he went online to participate in a discussion, which is slightly more than in June 2001 (20 percent) and November 2001 (21 percent). The most prominent factor that influenced participation is the age factor, revealing that the youngest generations were much more likely than the older ones to debate online—while 45 percent of the people between 15 and 24 years have discussions online, this was the case for only 8 percent of the people who were more than 55 years old. The survey also reveals that men are slightly more likely than women to debate online and that citizens who are unemployed

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(34 percent) and manual workers (25 percent) have discussions online more than the ones who are self-employed and employees (both 18 percent). From a geographical perspective, the countries whose populations debate more online are Spain (44 percent), Portugal (29 percent), Belgium (27 percent), and France (26 percent). At the other end of the spectrum, the countries where citizens communicate less online are Greece and the Netherlands (both 19 percent), the United Kingdom (17 percent), Denmark (16 percent), and Ireland (14 percent). These findings suggest that the private usage of online debates is not a marginal activity and that it is likely to increase. This should be the case as the young generations, by far the greatest users of the online debates, are likely to continue to do so. Also, the perpetual evolution of the online discursive architectures, in the sense of a greater attractiveness and user-friendliness, should lead to an increasing number of people using them. Finally, even if we make the unlikely assertion that the proportion of Internet users debating online will remain unchanged, the global number of citizens debating online will increase as a consequence of the increased level of Internet connections. But do people also debate online on political matters? Or does the Web essentially host debates on private/personal matters? These are the questions that will be analyzed in the following sections. 3.1.2

Political Web Discussion in Electoral Period

While the political use of the Internet for getting information, particularly electoral information, is starting to be widely documented and analyzed (see, for example, Lusoli 2005; Dumont et al. 2005), the importance of the usage of the online political debates is still rarely analyzed. The recent studies on the electoral campaigns in the United States and France, which will now be discussed, are among the rare studies that allow us to measure the extent to which the Internet is used for informative as well as discursive purposes. With regard to the importance that the Internet has acquired in electoral periods, the survey conducted during the American midterm elections of 2006 (PEW 2007) reveals that almost one out of three American adults—that is 31 percent of all American adults or 46 percent of all the Internet users—say they went online during the campaign season for gathering information and/or exchanging views via e-mail. This represents more than 60 million people who used the Internet for electoral purposes. But these elections also revealed that the Internet is increasingly perceived as a major source of information in comparison to the other media, since 15 percent of all American adults say the Internet was the primary source for campaign news during the election,


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up from 7 percent in the midterm election of 2002, and close to the 18 percent of Americans who said they relied on the Internet during the presidential campaign cycle in 2004. This is less than the score of television (69 percent) or the newspapers (34 percent), but similar to that of radio (18 percent), and much more than that of magazines (2 percent). A very similar trend could be observed during the last presidential campaign in France (IFOP 2007): 40 percent of Internet users reported that they regularly searched for political information on the Internet and 21 percent of Internet users said they trusted the Web as the primary source of information for the presidential campaign.1 Internet arrived in third position after television (42 percent), the national press (33 percent), and radio (32 percent). Unsurprisingly, the citizens who were more likely to consider the Internet as the primary source of information were the ones who considered themselves very interested in the political campaign (30 percent). More interesting for us, both surveys also reveal that the Internet was used in a significant way to share and exchange political content. In the United States, 8 percent of campaign Internet users posted their own political commentary to a newsgroup, Web site, or blog; 13 percent of them forwarded or posted someone else’s political commentary; 8 percent of them forwarded or posted someone else’s political audio or video recordings; and 1 percent of them created political audio or video recordings. The study concludes that all in all, 23 percent of campaign Internet users (or 11 percent of Internet users and 7 percent of the entire U.S. population) had done at least one of those things. If we focus on the online discussions (chats, newsgroups, blogs, forums), this means that 4 percent of the American Internet users—that is, approximately five million American citizens—debated online during the last midterm campaign. It is a similar score to that of the presidential elections of 2004 (Davis 2005, 27). In France—where some parties (particularly the socialist party and the centrist party Union pour la Democratie Française (UDF) built their campaign on a direct involvement through the Internet—the proportion of the citizens who had discussions online for electoral purposes is much higher than in the United States since 17 percent of the Internet users declared that the online debate (passive and/or active) was part of their electoral activities. This is less than the “search for political information” (40 percent) and “circulating information or argumentations” (22 percent) but more than “visiting the Web site of a political party” (15 percent), “watching a political video” (12 percent), and “visiting a political blog” (10 percent). The online discussants were more likely to be strongly interested by the political campaign (40 percent), sympathizers of the outsider candidate from the

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centrist party (32 percent), strong Internet users (22 percent), and men (20 percent). 3.1.3

Political Web Discussion among the Young Generations

It is common to hear that the young generations are the ones who should benefit most from the democratic potentialities of the Web since they are the most familiar and fervent users of the Internet in their everyday life. This is obviously an optimistic scenario that supposes that as an increasing number of young citizens use the Web for their leisure and professional activities, they would also be likely to use the Internet as a means of progressively more active political engagement. But is such an inference correct? Is it not the case that the political malaise or indifference of the young citizens has more profound origins than a simple nonadaptation to the conventional methods of political engagement? If so, the provision of new participative and appealing tools (such as blogging, Web debates, opinion polling, e-consultation procedures, online voting, etc.) would be insufficient to foster the political (re)engagement of the young citizens. In a recent European survey (Flash EB 202 2007), young citizens (15 to 30 years old) of the 27 EU member states were asked if and how they have been politically involved during the last year in order to ensure that their voice is heard by the policy makers.2 This survey is particularly interesting, for among the traditional options envisaged (petition, demonstration, partisan activism, etc.), one was the “participation in online discussions/forum.” Table 3.1 presents the global scores for the different options for the 27 EU member states and compares the scores of 15 “old” member states with the ones of the 12 new member states. A first surprise is that the online forums have become one of the major channels of political engagement among the young generations. Table 3.1 Political involvement of European young citizens Signed a petition

EU15 NMS12 Total

30% 21% 28%

Presented Took part your views in a public in a Web demonstration forum

23% 26% 24%

24% 9% 20%

Worked for an NGO

Was active in or member of a trade union

Worked for a political party or action group

12% 8% 11%

9% 5% 8%

5% 5% 5%


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One young citizen out of four (24 percent) has posted political comments on an online forum in the last year. This means that the online forum has become the second means of political mobilization just behind “signing petitions” (28 percent), but clearly ahead of the more classical forms of mobilization: “participation in a public demonstration” (20 percent), “working for NGOs” (11 percent), “trade unions” (8 percent), and “activity in political parties/action groups” (5 percent). Even more surprising, the online forums are perceived as a privileged means of mobilization among the 12 new member states (26 percent), well ahead of the other possibilities of political mobilization that scored particularly low. Among the 15 old EU members, this trend is less marked since it reaches just the third position, seven percentage points behind “signing a petition” and just one percentage point behind “taking part in a public demonstration.” Regarding the sociodemographic profiles of the young users of the forum, the data reveal that male respondents were more likely than female ones to participate actively in online forums (28.5 percent versus 18.6 percent), and that respondents living in a metropolitan area (28.4 percent) or an urban area (24.3 percent) were slightly more likely to be active in online forums than those coming from rural areas (20.1 percent). This is the case as well for respondents who are not working (25.3 percent), self-employed (23.5 percent), or employees (22.4 percent), in comparison to manual workers (17.2 percent). Also, highly educated respondents who completed their formal education after the age of 20 (25.1 percent) and respondents who are still undergoing formal education (27.2 percent) were more likely to have been active in online forums in comparison to citizens who stopped their education before the age of 15 (14.2 percent) or between 16 and 20 years of age (19.1 percent). From a national perspective, the countries where political forums are most appreciated are Lithuania (40.4 percent), Finland (37.6 percent), the Netherlands (31.6 percent), and Poland (30.2 percent). A second group of forum enthusiasts is composed of the young coming from Estonia (27.9 percent), the Czech Republic (27.6 percent), Slovenia (27.1 percent), and Germany (27 percent). Finally, the countries where online political forums are used comparatively less by young citizens are Bulgaria (16 percent), Italy (17.2 percent), Latvia (15.4 percent), Cyprus (15.6 percent), and Ireland (13.5 percent). How can we explain why young people have such a positive view of the Internet, particularly online debates, as a means to become politically active? There are probably several interconnected reasons. First, the familiarity the younger generations have in using the Internet for communicating with each other (blogs, e-mails, chats, MSN, MySpace, etc.) certainly

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contributes to explaining their higher level of participation in online political forums. Second, debating—like petitioning and demonstrating— is a political activity that is particularly adapted to young people since it does not require long-term engagement and does not carry the same social baggage that might be attached to the membership of a political party or a trade union. Third, the online debate is particularly adapted to the needs of the young generation since it is a form of engagement that is rather loose: participants in online discussions generally have the possibility to express themselves informally and to drop-out at any moment without having to assume any unpleasant consequences for their behavior. Such a “cool” context of interaction may attract young citizens that like to quickly move from one site to the other and may feel uncomfortable in formal and public discussion settings. Finally, the success of the online political debates may also reveal that the young generations particularly trust this form of engagement for influencing policymakers. This supposition tends to be confirmed by the way these same young people replied to the question concerning the political actions that they believed to be the most important to ensure that their voice is heard by the policy makers.3 The greatest number of respondents considered that the best way to influence policymakers was “to participate in debates with policymakers.” This option, chosen by 29 percent of the respondents, is by far the most privileged relative to other options such as “joining a political party” (16 percent), “participating in a demonstration” (13 percent), “signing a petition” (11 percent), “becoming member of an NGO” (11 percent), or “joining a trade union” (11 percent). In other words, a discursive and direct contact with political representatives is believed to be more effective as a political channel of action than the other more traditional forms of political mobilization. This finding should be considered as a key element for devising strategies aimed at involving the young generation in the political process on- and off line. 3.2

Online Discursive Offer

The question of the discursive offer of online political debates has, to our knowledge, never been analyzed in a systematic and comparative way. Most of the Web-content analyses, which also scrutinize the presence of online debates, are generally based on some specific case studies and the rare existing comparative studies generally evaluate a specific category of political actors (for example, just media or just political parties or just parliaments or just cities). The present section aims to initiate a more comprehensive research agenda by comparing recent analyses that measure the Web-discursive


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offer of three major political actors: the parliaments, the cities, and the political parties. The two first categories of actors are indicative of the online offer of the institutional actors while the political parties are partly representative of civil society associations. The Web-interactive features analyzed are “the presence of e-mail” “the presence of online forums,” and “the presence of e-consultation forums.” Other less fundamental interactive features have also been assessed for some of them such as the presence of “contact information,” “opinion polls,” and “chat rooms.” For each category of actors we will also focus on the incentives to provide (or not) discursive interactive features. From a positive perspective, one can suppose that the institutional Web sites as well as the political parties should take advantage of such interactive possibilities for increasing trust in their institutions, for developing closer links with the citizens, and for getting feedback on some specific issues. These are rather realistic incentives that may apply—with different intensities and for different reasons—to parliaments, political parties, and local authorities. Political parties may also be particularly willing to develop Web-interactive features for organizing their campaigns, for promoting internal debates among their sympathizers as well as for developing new ideas and strategies of political action. On the other hand, it may also be that institutional actors and political parties prefer limiting the direct intervention of the citizens through the new media. A first reason may derive from the costs it implies: developing interactive features such as e-mail, online forums, and e-consultation procedures requires people, time, and money that can be prohibitive for certain institutions and political parties. A second reason may derive from the reluctance of the political elite to further integrate the citizens into the political process. This reluctance is generally rooted in a fear of seeing their role as political representatives being put into question, as well as a fear that an uncontrolled introduction of e-participative features, such as e-voting, e-consultation, and e-petition could lead, in the long run, to a system of “push button” democracy in which the decisions would not be taken anymore by the wise and responsible representatives, but by the mass of manipulated citizens.4 A final reason for not implementing Web-discursive features may also derive from the belief that such types of interactions are not serious or constructive. In defense of such a position, it is generally argued that participation in online forums or e-consultations tends to be low and not representative of the general population—chaotic and disrespectful. These are just some general hypotheses that could explain (at least partially) the way institutional Web sites and the political parties have implemented their Web-discursive features. However, since these actors have different roles and missions within the political process, one cannot expect them

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to be relevant in the same way for each of them. For this reason, more specific hypotheses will be elaborated for each category of actors. The first category of actors analyzed is the parliament, followed by the city and the political party. 3.2.1 Parliamentary Web Interaction

The Internet is often invoked as an instrument that could contribute to limiting the crisis of parliamentary representation, which according to several observers (Ward et al. 2005; Coleman 2006) is severe and profound. Among other things, it is argued that MPs have lost touch with their electors, that citizens trust representative institutions less, and that parliaments have lost much of their competences in favor of national executives and supranational institutions. It is common to hear that national parliaments in EU member states correspond to simple “recording chambers” for EU legislation, which on average represents more than half of the legislation adopted at the national level. Several scholars argue that communication technologies could strongly contribute to reinforcing the trust and the democratic mission of the national parliaments by making representative institutions more transparent and accessible and by fostering a greater deliberation and cooperation between the MPs, civil society, and the citizens (Coleman & Goetz 2001; Coleman 2006). In particular, they suggest that an innovative and participative use of the new technologies could help the legislative bodies to take more informed decisions on issues that are increasingly complex and to build new communicative bridges with their constituents who feel excluded from the legislative process. In other words, a wise usage of the new technologies could contribute to the realization of legislative debates in which “public aspirations, anxieties and complaints can be aired and addressed, and the public voice can be heard in all of its pluralistic diversity” (Coleman 2006, 372). In what follows, an analysis will be presented of the extent to which MPs and citizens share this particularly optimistic view, as well as their use of parliamentary Web sites. This will be followed by an assessment of the extent to which parliamentary institutions have implemented possibilities of discursive interaction on their Web sites. 3.2.1.1 Views and Usage of Parliamentary E-participation The members of parliament generally express a great enthusiasm for the democratic potentialities of the new media. This is the conclusion of Jens Hoff (2004) in his comments on a survey that was sent to the MPs of four EU countries with different levels of Internet penetration (Norway and


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Denmark with a high rate of penetration; Austria with an intermediary rate of penetration; and Portugal with a low rate of penetration). In this survey, the majority of the MPs declared that the new technologies should “create new democratic practices,” “encourage more citizens to participate,” and “enlarge the number of topics on the political agenda.” More interestingly for us, a great majority of MPs consider that the new technologies would “improve the democratic dialogue within the democratic process.” The factor that was the most strongly correlated with a positive attitude was the degree of involvement with ICT. According to Hoff, such positive views about e-democratic potentialities is explained by the fact that the MPs are generally part of “a European elite that internalizes or actively takes part in creating a conception (a discourse) about the positive effects of ICT both when it comes to economic and democratic matters” (Hoff 2004, 65). Similar highly enthusiastic appraisals were also observed in a survey conducted among parliamentary officials of several European countries (Coleman 2006).5 Over 90 percent of the respondents agreed that ICT would “lead to more public participation in the work of parliaments,” “widen the parliamentary agenda,” “create more interactive dialogue between MPs and the public,” and “lead to more informed parliamentary decisions.” A total of 85 percent considered that “citizens should be consulted online by parliamentarians.” And from a general view point: “Eight out of ten respondents considered that ICT could help to reduce the democratic deficit, with slightly more optimism expressed by newer democracies and countries with lower level of Internet access” (Coleman 2006, 378). Concerning the users’ side, a survey conducted in 2004 in the United Kingdom (Ward et al. 2005) suggests that citizens were slightly less enthusiastic about the democratic use of the ICTs by the parliament: 44 percent would like all MPs to use e-mail addresses (19 percent against), 43 percent indicated that they would like to being able to comment via e-mail to the Parliament on major laws being discussed (25 percent against), and 22 percent would like MPs to have Web sites (19 percent against). What is not envisaged in the questionnaire is whether discussion should be conducted with citizens on the Web site of the parliament on the major laws being discussed. However, this question was raised for the government in the following way: “Would you like special chatroom/discussion forums for the government to engage in debates about important government issues?” This issue was controversial since 30 percent were against, 33 percent did not mind, and “only” 29 percent were favorable. It is an open question whether e-consultation procedures hosted on the Web site of the parliament would be better accepted by the citizens.

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One could expect from the expression of the shared positive attitude concerning the democratic potential of ICTs that both MPs and (to a lesser extent) citizens should be strong users of the parliamentary Web sites. The limited data describing the effective use of the parliamentary Web site do not give much credit to this supposition. A recent survey conducted in the United Kingdom reveals that among the Internet users, only 5 percent said they had visited the Web site of the House of Commons in the last 12 months, and less than 2 percent declared to have visited the personal Web sites of their MPs (Ward et al. 2005).6 In the same vein, this study reveals that e-mail was not perceived by a broad category of the population as the ideal tool to enter into contact with the MPs. Only 12 percent consider that this is the case, while for 39 percent of respondents the phone is reportedly the medium of choice, and for 20 percent of them letter writing is preferred. This low rate of usage of the parliamentary Web sites suggests, as previously mentioned, that the Web site of the parliaments are not perceived by citizens, MPs, and parliamentary administration as an arena where political debates and exchanges should be initiated with the constituents. The authors of the study rightly conclude that the “parliament and their members thus seem farther away than other institutions from citizen’s everyday needs” (idem, 10). But could this low rate of usage of the parliamentary Web sites partly be due to an unsatisfying online discursive offer? Or do citizens avoid frequenting the Web sites of their parliaments despite the presence of interesting and innovative Web opportunities to discuss legislative matters? In the following section we will provide some answers to these questions by analyzing the Web-discursive supply of parliamentary Web sites. 3.2.1.2 Web Parliaments’ Interactive Supply The evaluation of the online presence of the parliaments is based on the data that were gathered for a report that maps the Web site presence, both of the political parties and the parliaments, in the 25 EU member states (Kies et al. 2004). Even if the findings are slightly dated since the research was conducted between March and July 2003, they still are sufficiently recent enough to offer a realistic snapshot of the interactive offer of the EU parliament and EU national parliaments. In total, 42 parliamentary Web sites were analyzed. These include the Web sites of lower chambers and upper chambers, the Web sites of regional parliaments (in the case of Belgium and the UK), and the Web site of the European parliament. The Web-interactive features analyzed were: (1) the presence of the e-mail of MPs—more precisely, what is measured is the percentage of MPs who had an e-mail address on the Web sites of the lower chambers of the 25 EU countries plus the European

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Parliament; (2) the presence of a contact information section; (3) the facilities to comment on the Web site; (4) the presence of a link to the ombudsman; (5) the presence of e-consultation features; (6) the presence of opinion polls; and (7) the presence of online forums. From a basic interactive perspective, figure 3.1 reveals that almost all the Web sites (93 percent) offered a “contact information section.” However, the parliaments that made this contact possibility interactive through their site were less numerous since just 55 percent of the legislative bodies offered a “facility for commenting on the Web site.” A much lower level of contact information was provided for the Ombudsman since only 13 parliaments (30.9 percent) offered this link. This rather low percentage is partly explained by the fact that during the period of the investigation some countries did not have any Ombudsman. For example, in Luxembourg this institution started functioning only in May 2004. The level of interactivity was also measured by assessing the presence/ absence of MPs and MEPs’ e-mail addresses. It is interesting to note that the presence of e-mail addresses was already, in 2003, a common feature, since an average of 86.7 percent of the representatives had an e-mail address and for eleven chambers all the MPs had an e-mail address.7 This same study, however, reveals that the presence of an e-mail address is absolutely not a guaranty that the legislative members will react. In order to test the level of responsiveness of the MPs, the national researchers who were involved in the project sent an e-mail to all their MPs in which they asked their opinions concerning the possibility of introducing online voting systems. To this question a response rate of only 21.4 percent was obtained. Set differently, one MP in five responded, and among the MPs that had an e-mail address one MP in four responded. The study

Contact info section E-mails of MPs and MEPs Possibility to comment on site Link to Ombudsman Online feedback (e-consultation) Online forum Opinion poll 0.0

20.0

40.0

60.0

80.0

100.0

Figure 3.1 Online interactive supply of national parliaments of 25 EU member states and of European Parliament Source: STOA report commissioned by the European Parliament. The data were gathered depending on the countries between March and July 2003.

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concluded that the old adage: “You can take a horse to water, but you cannot make him drink” seemed to apply rather well. Regarding now the more visible interactive features, a first general question was raised—whether opinion polls were provided. This feature was provided by just the French upper chamber (Sénat). A second feature that was measured is whether the Web site of the parliaments hosted online forums. Only seven parliaments out of 42 offered this possibility (16.6 percent): the regional parliament of Wales, the Senado in Spain, the regional parliament of Scotland, the Bundestag in Germany, the French Sénat and Assemblée Nationale, and the Danish parliament. This low score is confirmed by a recent study (Setälä & Grönlund 2006) that compared the parliamentary Web sites of selected EU countries and those of Canada, the United States, New Zealand, and Switzerland. In total, 17 parliaments were scrutinized and among them only three provided an online forum: France, Germany, and New Zealand. Finally, a third feature that was measured is whether feedback on issues could be given online. This corresponds to an e-consultation tool, through which, we suppose, the parliament asks citizens their opinions on some specific issues. The result is quite encouraging since ten parliaments (23.8 percent) were coded as offering an opportunity “to give feedback” on specific issues. But the simple possibility of giving feedback does not necessarily correspond to an e-consultation forum whose outcome would be integrated into the decision-making process of the legislative body. It could correspond to a simple general e-mail address or “comment box” through which citizens are invited to raise questions or express opinions without knowing, however, whether these would be processed by the legislative administration. In order to clarify to what extent the feedback features that were observed corresponded to proper discursive e-consultation mechanisms, we conducted a control test around June 2007. This test revealed that among the ten legislative bodies that were notified as possessing the possibility to give feedback only three provided a discursive e-consultation supply.8 And, even more, none of them offered ongoing consultation on their Web site. Moreover, it appears that the legislative bodies experienced this procedure very sporadically in the past. The Bundestag organized just one e-consultation in 2004 concerning the improvements of its Web site. The Sénat organized 18 e-consultations, but most of them took place between 1997 and 2001. Finally, the Scottish Parliament presented an e-consultation feature, but no consultations were ongoing and none were archived. However, the Scottish parliament presented another particularly interesting and successful interactive feature, the e-petition, through which it is possible not only to initiate and vote on petitions, but also to comment on them.


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It is probably the only parliament worldwide to offer such a possibility on its Web site. 3.2.1.3 Comments In sum, not only are the parliaments not willing to host free and open online forums, but they also reject the possibility of hosting discursive consultation features. While it is understandable that parliaments consider that it is not their mission to host open and uncontrolled debates on their Web sites, it seems more surprising that they did not want to host more focused and constructive debates on some ongoing legislative debates. As previously mentioned, a well implemented e-consultation procedure offers the opportunity for the legislators to gather, in an efficient way, the multiplicity of opinions and competences stemming from the public; it is also a way to decrease the influence of the lobbies and pressure groups on the legislative process by giving a direct channel of expression to the civil society and, more importantly, to the citizens. This is all the more surprising in that the vast majority of MPs and parliamentary employees expressed a belief in the capacity of the new media to increase the deliberative involvement of citizens in the legislative process. Why then did so few parliaments provide discursive e-consultation features? A first set of reasons has already been mentioned in the introductory part of this section. First, this can be due to the administrative and financial costs that are involved. Such an explanation is, however, not particularly convincing since one can suppose that a major national political structure, such as a parliament, should have no difficulty in finding the funds and the competent staff to realize valuable e-consultation experiences. Second, such reluctance could (partly) derive from an absence of political willingness of the MPs who may fear that the introduction of more direct form of participation may jeopardize their role and/or could lead to a degradation of the democratic process. This reason is, however, contradicted by the fact that most of the parliamentary members have declared to be fervent e-democratic promoters. Finally, one cannot dismiss the possibility that most of the parliaments never thought seriously of promoting a greater engagement of their constituents through their Web sites. Some MPs and members of the parliamentary staff may have declared that it would be a “good idea” but never really considered to be a realistic option, for many of them probably consider that the legislative process is already sufficiently complicated to integrate in it new discursive e-consultation procedures. From a deliberative perspective the fact that the parliaments were not more proactive for implementing on their Web sites possibilities of interaction is to be blamed. It is a missed opportunity not only for the parliament itself, which through such an initiative could have gained the

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sympathy and trust of the public opinion, but, more fundamentally, from the viewpoint of the deliberative improvement of our democracies. We believe that if parliaments organize online debates around, for example, ongoing legislation, these are likely to lead to debates that would be particularly deliberative insofar as they would match with several of the deliberative discursive criteria and would allow the expression of voices that otherwise would probably not reach the attention of the legislators. In the next chapter, the reasons why we suggest that Web contexts, such as the parliamentary ones, are particularly promising from the viewpoint of the deliberation will be exposed more in depth. If most of the parliaments do not have the willingness and/or the possibility of implementing interactive supplies, this does not mean that all the institutional Web sites adopt such a position. Some administrative authority such as the local authority may be more adapted and motivated for promoting greater citizens’ involvement through the online forum and the e-consultation procedures. 3.2.2 Cities’ Web Interaction

It is common to hear that the local level should be particularly adapted to promoting a deeper and wider involvement of citizens because it is a context where many citizens already know each other as well as their local representatives, and where the political engagement is perceived to be more concrete and visible than at the national and supranational levels. It is also argued that local administrations should be particularly willing to implement discursive consultation since they recognize that citizens and local social networks have a special commitment to and knowledge of the local realities (Scott 2006). While several experiences of local involvement of citizens through the ICTs have been analyzed notably for measuring the level of deliberation of some specific online debates (Jankowski & Van Os 2002; Jensen 2003a; Albrecht 2003), or for assessing innovative forms of political involvement such as the participative budgeting (Virapatirin & Peixoto, 2006), studies that attempt to evaluate and compare systematically the offer of online possibilities of debates are much more scarce. As for the analysis of the parliaments, the Web-discursive potential at the local level will be analyzed on the basis of data that reveal the usage and willingness of citizens and local representatives to implement e-participative features and the extent to which these are actually implemented by the local authorities. 3.2.2.1 Views on Local E-participation and Usage of Local Web Sites Regarding the perception of the e-participative features at the local level, a mixed picture can be drawn. An American survey of 2002 reveals that


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a clear majority of the U.S. local representatives consider that the usage of e-mail with their constituents help “to better understand public opinion,” to “improve their relations with community groups,” and “to be in contact with citizens from whom they never heard before” (Pew 2002). While e-mails are widely praised, a survey we conducted with the Luxembourgian mayors suggests that local representatives do not share the same enthusiasm for consulting citizens online:9 only 17 percent of them considered that the “online consultation” was part of their conception of local democracy,10 which places it far behind the existing democratic instruments, such as the “transparency of the debates of the communal council” (85.7 percent) and the “elections of the communal council every six years” (76.6 percent) (Dumont et al. 2009). As far as the citizens are concerned, a Danish survey conducted in 2002 reveals that a significant number of Danish citizens would be eager to enter into greater contact with their local politicians through the Web site. The report reveals that 31 percent would take part in “discussions with local politicians” on the municipal homepage, 36 percent would “participate in electronic public hearings,” and 22 percent would “follow local government meetings” (Levinsen 2005, 3). If one now looks at the number of people visiting local government Web sites, one would expect that the cities’ Web sites would be consulted more frequently than the those of parliaments, not only because local politics is perceived to be closer than the national and supranational levels, but also, more prosaically, because local Web sites provide everyday-life information (timetable of busses and trains, information about events, phone numbers of doctors, tourist information, etc.) that are not provided by legislative Web sites and that generally constitute one of the major reasons for visiting the cities’ Web sites. This greater power of attraction of the cities’ Web sites is confirmed by a Danish survey of 2002 (Wiklund 2005) and a Norwegian survey of 2003 (Saglie & Vabo 2005). The analysis from Denmark reveals that the use of the local Web sites is both important and increasing: 33 percent of the citizens who had Internet access at home visited their municipal Web sites, which correspond to an impressive increase in visits—65 percent—in two years (Wiklund 2005, 710–711).11 In Norway, the usage of the local Web sites is even higher since 47 percent of the Internet users visited them to look for information (2 percent at least once a week; 9 percent at least once a month; and 36 percent less often) (Saglie & Vabo 2005, 15). This Norwegian investigation also reveals that the citizens make a rather extensive use of e-mail to enter in contact with the local authorities: 16 percent sent an e-mail enquiry to nonelected council officers and 9 percent said they had sent e-mails to local councilors on local community issues

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(Saglie & Vabo 2005, 15). A Swedish survey conducted in the winter of 2002–2003 reveals that local politicians as well tend to make a rather important use of e-mails to stay in contact with their constituents since more than one out of two (55 percent) reported they had used e-mail to be in contact with the public. Among them, 12 percent said they were in contact with their citizens at least once a week, 13 percent at least once a month, and 30 percent less often (Levinsen 2005, 3). The usage of e-mail is even more important among the U.S. local representatives. According to a survey conducted in 2002,12 79 percent of the municipal officials interviewed said they had received e-mail from citizens or local groups (among them some 25 percent declare to receive e-mail from their constituents everyday) and 61 percent reported that they communicated via e-mail with citizens at least weekly (among them 21 percent say they do so everyday) (PEW 2002). In the next section, we will see whether the fact that local Web sites are more visited and used than the parliamentary Web sites has encouraged local authorities, who also sing the praises of the democratic potentialities of the ICTs, to develop more channels of civic interaction. 3.2.2.2 Web–Cities’ Interactive Offer The analysis of the Web-discursive offer of the cities is based on six comparable and recent empirical studies completed both in the United States and in the EU. The empirical studies selected are the following: (1) Webcontent analysis of major EU cities: The local Web sites analyzed were those of 35 major cities in 12 EU member states. This includes the cities with more than 500,000 inhabitants and of the national capitals belonging to Austria, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, and the United Kingdom. The investigation took place during the second half of 2003 and the first half of 2004 (Torres et al. 2006); (2) Web-content analysis of major U.S. cities: The Web-content analysis is based on the 100 largest cities in the United States. Among them 23 cities had less than 120,000 residents, 45 cities had 120,000– 459,999 residents, and 32 had more than 460,000 residents. The data were gathered in February 2004 (Scott 2006); (3) Web-content analysis of UK cities: The local Web sites analyzed are those of 469 cities during the second half of 2003 (Hands 2005); (4) Web-content analysis of French cities: The Web sites of 240 cities in France were analyzed in 2000. The cities have been selected on the basis of their geographical location (cities from Ile-de-France versus cities from South West of France) and on the basis of the number of inhabitants of the cities (cities belonging to the federation of mayors of intermediary cities versus cities belonging to the association of mayors from the big cities) (Corbineau et al. 2003);

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(5) Web-content analysis of Norwegian cities: The Web sites of 433 cities in Norway were analyzed in spring 2003 (Saglie & Vabo 2005); and (6) Web-content analysis of Swedish cities: the Web content of 289 cities was analyzed in the summer of 2002 (Wiklund 2007). The interactive offer of these empirical investigations is measured on the basis of four interactive features. A first level of interactivity was measured by the presence of e-mails—checking whether the e-mail of the mayor and of the councilors were online. A second level of interactivity was measured by the presence of online forums. Finally, as for the parliament, the possibilities offered (or not) for discursive e-consultation opportunities were assessed. From a general perspective, table 3.2 shows that the Web presence of the cities is similar to that already seen in the case of the parliaments. A large number of cities provide the e-mails of the political representatives, a limited number offer online forums (with the exception of large EU and Norwegian cities), and almost no city organizes consultations on its Web site. Regarding the provision of e-mail addresses, the data gathered reveal Table 3.2

Online interactive supply in U.S. and EU cities

Local Web sites of major EU cities (Torres et al. 2005) (1) Local Web sites of major U.S. cities (Scott 2006) (2) Local Web sites in the United Kingdom (Hands 2005) (3) Local Web sites in France (Corbineau et al. 2003) (4) Local Web sites in Norway (Saglie and Vabo 2005) (5) Local Web sites in Sweden (Wiklund 2007) (6)

E-mail of mayor

E-mail of councillors

Online forum

Discursive e- consultation

63%

41%

26%

na

80%

79%

2%

0%

na

na

4.3%

2%

93%*

na

10%

na

54%

16%

14%

5%

na

43%

19%

na

(1) Web site content analysis conducted on 35 EU cities Containing the biggest and the national capitals of AU, BE, F, GE, GR, I, LU, NE, PO, SP, UK. Data gathered during second half of 2003 and first half of 2004 (2) Web site content analysis of the 100 largest metropolitan areas in the United States. Data gathered in February 2004 (3) Web site content analysis of 469 local Web sites in the United Kingdom. Data gathered in latter in half of 2003 (4) Web site content analysis of 240 municipalities in France. Data gathered in 2000 (5) Web site content analysis conducted on 433 muncipalities in spring 2003 (6) Web site content analysis conducted on 289 municipalities in summer 2002 *What is measured is the general e-mail to the town hall

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that the majority of the Web sites analyzed provide the e-mail address of the local representatives (whether from the mayor or the local councilor). It is interesting to note that, generally, the e-mail of the mayor is more present than the ones of the local councilors. This was particularly the case for the major EU cities (63 percent versus 41 percent) and for the cities in Norway (54 percent versus 16 percent). This difference was however not perceptible for the major U.S. cities for which the e-mail addresses of the local councilors and mayors were both highly present (80 percent versus 79 percent). The presence of online forums varies on the basis of the geographic location and the size of the cities. The importance of the geographical location is revealed by the fact that the major EU cities were much more likely to provide an online forum than the major cities in the United States. In fact, more than one city out of four (26 percent) in the EU countries hosted an online forum while this was the case of almost no city in the United States (2 percent). It is also revealed by the fact that the Web forums were significantly less present in the cities of United Kingdom and France (respectively 4.3 percent and 10 percent) than the ones of the Scandinavian countries of our sample (Norway 14 percent and Sweden 19 percent). The impact of the size of the cities on the online discursive offer has been observed and measured in the Scandinavian countries (Saglie & Vabo 2005) as well as in France where the 50 most important cities were much more likely to offer an online forum (26 percent) than the global average of the cities analyzed (10 percent) (Corbineau et al. 2003). Finally, with regard to the discursive e-consultation features, these were in many cases not measured (Torres et al. 2005; Corbineau et al. 2003; Wiklund, 2005) And when these were measured, they were absent, as in the United States (Scott 2006), or provided a confusing result, as in the United Kingdom (Hands 2005) and Norway (Saglie & Vabo 2005). In fact, for both studies, the e-consultation features based on many-to-many discursive interaction could not be distinguished from simple feedback features that could take the format of e-mail, proposal boxes, or opinion pools. On the basis of these disparate findings, one can rather safely affirm that discursive e-consultation were almost absent from the local Web sites. 3.2.2.3 Comments The conclusion is inescapable. As tends to be the case for parliaments, the cities’ Web sites are oriented toward increasing transparency and efficiency of information delivery and, to a lesser extent, encouraging communication in the form of direct points of access to elected representatives and officials. In other words, it is not yet running as an effective medium facilitating citizen consultation, policy discussion, or other


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democratic inputs into the policy-making process. The only exceptions to this general negative trend concern the provision of online forums that scored relatively high for the major EU cities (26 percent) and for the 289 Swedish municipalities (19 percent). There are several plausible explanations that can contribute to explaining this reluctance of the cities to provide new channels of e-participation. It may signify that local authorities are more concerned with the translation of e-commerce tools to give themselves an image of modernization and responsiveness rather than with the introduction of real changes in the way in which public administrations interact with citizens. Also, the differences observed in the Web-discursive offer between the minor and major cities suggest that the administrative costs and the relevance of implementing such e-participative features could have weighed on the choice of implementing them. Another hypothesis, put forward by James Scott, suggests that the low level of interactive offer may be explained by the lack of policy direction from state and federal government (Scott 2006, 349). From our viewpoint, it may also be that the majority of local authorities simply ignore the participative and deliberative potentialities of the online tools and, at a more conscious level, that they don’t see the need to improve the quality of democracy in their town.13 3.2.3

Political Parties’ Web Interaction

The usage and impact of the Internet on political parties have raised greater interest than that seen in the cases of parliaments and local authorities. This may be explained by the fact that the legitimacy of political parties is subject to far greater criticism than has been faced by the cities and parliaments. In 2004, only 17 percent of the EU citizens expressed trust in their national political parties.14 This crisis of trust is characterized, among other things, by a constant fall in party membership (Mair & Van Biezen 2003), a decreasing voter turnout, a transformation of the traditional partisan voter and activist into a more volatile type of voter, and a more individualist/consumerist activist through interest groups, single issues organizations, and new social movements (Norris 1999). This evolution is generally explained by the social fragmentation and the withering of the political parties’ social basis and by the corruption and financial scandals that have multiplied during the last years due to illicit donations coming from the domestic and international private sectors (Schmitter & Trechsel 2004, 43). Finally, the increasing importance of the mass media is also perceived as a major factor for explaining the decline of the traditional functions of the political parties. The primacy of television in the political process has led to campaigns dominated by

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personality contests, packaged political messages, and progressive replacement of the voluntary contribution of the militants and citizens by the advertising agencies and opinion pollsters. All these evolutions have reinforced the feeling of cynicism and distrust against the political process in general and the political parties in particular (Sartori 2000). Such distrust has nurtured a great interest—often based on extreme hope as well as fear—concerning how the Internet could influence the role political parties play in the political process. The questions that emerged more vigorously are whether the appearance of the Web modifies the role and the weight of the political parties in the political process and, more interestingly for us, whether it changes the intrapartisan methods of communication, particularly through its interactive features. As far as the impact of the Web on the role of the political parties is concerned, different scenarios have been envisioned (Ward et al. 2002). At one end of the spectrum one finds the “no-change scenario,” which considers that the Internet is unlikely to have an important impact on traditional representative structures such as political parties since the Internet is essentially used for consumer and leisure activities. At the other end of the spectrum one finds the “direct democracy scenario,” which suggests that the rise of ICTs spells the end for traditional representative structures for they provide increasing opportunities for the citizens to have a direct impact on the decision-making process through, for example, electronic voting, online forums, or e-consultation procedures. More moderate approaches such as the “accelerated pluralism scenario” imply that the new media may well reduce the role of traditional representative organization in favor of new political subjects (single-issue networks, protest campaigns, etc.) that would enter into competition with the political parties. Regarding now the more specific participatory potential of the Internet on political parties, three scenarios can also be envisaged. The “participatory scenario” suggests that ICTs might be harnessed by political parties to reengage the public and stimulate more participation through party structures. This view is, however, challenged by the “administrative modernization scenario,” which suggests that parties may simply use the information capacity and speed of the Internet to modernize and make more efficient their existing practices with limited impact on their participatory functions. Finally, an even more skeptical view—the “reinforcement scenario”—suggests that the ICTs will be used by the party elites or the already most involved activists to reinforce their own positions. For the limited framework of this analysis, the questions raised by the participatory scenario are the most pertinent. The realization of the participatory scenario suggests that party members and sympathizers should widely communicate through e-mail and online forums in order


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to exchange opinions on party policies. It also implies that online feedback/ e-consultation procedures through which parties’ elite ask citizens their opinion should be widely implemented. Differently from the analysis of the parliaments and the cities, very few data on the use and appreciation of the political parties’ Web sites were found. The only data that we could gather suggest that the usage of the political party Web sites tends to be low: a European survey of 2000 reveals that only 10 percent of the Internet users from the 15 EU member states have visited the Web site of a political party in the last three months (EB Special Survey 53 2000). This situation does not seem to change very much in electoral periods. For example, during the last French presidential campaign, only 15 percent of the Internet users said they had at least occasionally visited the Web site of a political party (IFOP 2007). Moreover, the users of the parties’ Web sites tend to correspond to the usual suspects—“strongly interested in the political campaign” (37 percent), “male” (20 percent), and “strong Internet users” (19 percent) (IFOP 2007, 20)—suggesting that the reinforcement thesis may be at work. The online deliberative potential of the political parties is, therefore, exclusively evaluated on the basis of a content analysis of their Web sites. 3.2.3.1 Web Parties’ Interactive Supply The Web-content analysis of the political parties is based, as for the parliaments, on the data that were gathered between February and June 2003 in the framework of the international report that was commissioned by the European Parliament (Kies et al. 2004). This report analyzes the Web presence of all the political parties that received at least three seats during the national elections that preceded the investigation and the seven European parties that existed at this time. By the end of the process 144 political parties’ Web sites were analyzed. Differently from this study, our sample is composed of 163 parties, for we also took into consideration the parties that were coded that had less than three seats.15 The discursive-interactive offer is measured by assessing the presence of e-mail and online forums. Concerning the presence of e-mails, three categories of e-mail were analyzed: the general e-mail, the e-mail of MPs, and the e-mail of local representatives. Differently from the cities and parliaments, the presence of e-consultation is not assessed. Instead, what can be defined as “gadget interactivity” is measured by assessing the presence of chat rooms and opinion polls. Figure 3.2 shows that similarly to the parliaments and the political parties, the most common interactive feature was e-mail. But differently from the institutional actors analyzed, the political parties appear to be keener in offering the possibility of debating online. In fact, almost half

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100.0 80.0 60.0 40.0 20.0 0.0 Gen e-mail E-mail MPs E-mail loc Web forum rep

Opinion poll

Chat

Figure 3.2 Interactive supply of EU national political parties and European political parties Source: STOA report commissioned by the European Parliament. The data were gathered between February and July 2003.

of the political parties hosted an online forum (47.2 percent) while this was the case for just 16.6 percent of the EU national parliaments (plus the EU parliament). By looking at the results more in detail, it appears that almost all the parties offered a general e-mail (91.4 percent) through which citizens could have a general access to the party. Six parties out of ten (60.7 percent) offered an access to the e-mail addresses of their representatives at the lower chambers.16 One observes that this absence of e-mail presence of MPs tends to be concentrated on a country basis,17 suggesting that for some countries a phenomenon of imitation is at work, according to which, if a majority of national parties make available the e-mail address of their MPs, then the other parties will be more likely to follow suit. Regarding the presence of the e-mail addresses of the local representatives, less than half of the parties (46.6 percent) indicated this contact address. This relatively low score may be due to the fact that political parties generally have specific Web sites for their local section where the contact details for local representative are normally provided. Turning now to the “gadget interactive features,” political parties appeared to be much more willing to implement them than, for instance, the institutional actors. One party out of ten implemented chat rooms (11.7 percent) and slightly less than one party out of three (31.3 percent) offered the possibility of participating in opinion polls. The opinion polls were clearly more appreciated by the political parties of some countries: two parties out of four in Spain, five parties out of seven in Slovenia, three parties out of six in Poland, two parties out of five in Luxembourg, and two parties out of four in France offered this feature. From the deliberative normative perspective, it is worthwhile noting that among the parties that offered an opinion poll, 16 parties went a bit further down the interactive path since they offered the facility to leave a personal comment. Regarding the


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chat rooms, its relatively low score derives presumably from the fact that this is a poor and unserious way of interacting. Moreover, the participation in the chat rooms hosted by the Web sites of political parties is generally very low. For some mysterious reasons, the chat rooms seemed to be particularly appreciated by the German, Maltese, and European parties.18 The online forum was the discursive-interactive feature that scored highest: almost half of the parties analyzed (47.2 percent) offered the opportunity to participate in the online debates, suggesting that political parties are more likely to make a participative use of their Web sites than the institutions with their Web sites. Table 3.3 reveals that the parties that were more likely to host a Web forum are those of the ten accession countries. The difference is relevant since 53.8 percent of the political parties of the accession countries offered the forum, while this was the case for only 41.9 percent political parties of the EU member states. Does this mean that the political parties (many of them being recently founded) are, or want to appear, more open and democratic? Or does this mean, as suggested by the analysis of the young citizens from eastern countries, that eastern citizens are simply more likely to be users of the online forum? So far no convincing answer can be given to this question. If we now look at the results per country, it appears that the political parties of some countries were particularly likely to offer online forums. For instance, all the political parties of Germany and Austria offered an online forum and almost all the parties of the Czech Republic, Latvia, the Slovak Republic, France, Sweden, and Hungary did so. At the other end of the spectrum, the political parties of three countries offered no online forum at all (Greece, Lithuania, United Kingdom) and in five countries just one political party did (Spain, Luxembourg, Portugal, Ireland, Cyprus). Finally, it is worthwhile noting that among the panEuropean political parties three offered the possibility to debate online. Concerning the activity within the forum, a strong majority (79.7 percent) presented at least one comment, but among these forums, significant differences of activity could be observed. It is possible to distinguish four equally distributed groups based on the liveliness of their forum: (1) a “low interactive group” that is composed of 14 parties that hosted a forum that contained less than 100 comments; (2) an “intermediary interactive group” that is composed of 16 parties that hosted a forum that contained between 100 and 500 comments; (3) a “strong interactive group” that is composed of 15 parties that hosted a forum that contained between 500 and 5000 comments; and (4) finally, a “very interactive group” that is composed of 13 parties that hosted forums that all contained more than 5,000 comments. If one considers that a forum can be defined as properly interactive if it contains at least 500 messages, this means that

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Table 3.3 Comparative analysis of national political parties’ Web-forum offer in the EU Country Germany Austria Czech Republic Latvia Slovak Rep. France Sweden Hungary Netherlands Malta Slovenia Poland Estonia EU Finland Denmark Belgium Italy Spain Luxembourg Portugal Ireland Cyprus United Kingdom Lithuania Greece EU-15 AC-10 Mean/Total

Nbr parties 7 4 5 9 8 4 7 7 9 3 8 6 6 7 8 6 10 7 4 5 6 6 8 4 5 4 93 65 163

Nbr forums 7 4 4 7 6 3 5 5 6 2 4 3 3 3 3 2 3 2 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 39 35 77

Percent by country 100.0 100.0 80.0 77.8 75.0 75.0 71.4 71.4 66.7 66.7 50.0 50.0 50.0 42.9 37.5 33.3 30.0 28.6 25.0 20.0 16.7 16.7 12.5 0.0 0.0 0.0 41.9 53.8 47.2

Source: STOA report commissioned by the European Parliament The data were gathered between February and July 2003 Note: EU-15 is the average score among the parties of the 15 Member States’ political parties. AC-10 is the average score among the political parties of the 10 Accession Countries. The mean/total is the average of these two groups with as well the European political parties.

17.2 percent of all the parties analyzed (28 among the 163 parties) and 36.4 percent of the political parties that host an online forum can be considered to be interactive. Among them, 11 were from Eastern countries and 18 from Western countries. This suggests that Western parties, when they provide an online forum, were more likely to host a vibrant online forum than Eastern parties. In fact, 46.2 percent of the Western parties’ online forums are vibrant, while this is the case for just 31.4 percent of the Eastern parties. It is also interesting to note that the very interactive parties tended to be disproportionately concentrated in certain countries: among


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the 13 parties whose Web sites had logged more than 5000 comments, four were from Germany (30.8 percent),19 three were from the Czech Republic (23 percent),20 three were from the Netherlands (23 percent),21 and the remaining three parties were Forza Italia in Italy, Die Gruenen from Austria, and the Parti Communiste in France. It would, however, be hazardous to derive from these data the conclusion that the political parties concerned necessarily have a strong participatory culture. Moreover, highly centralized parties such as Forza Italia in Italy or the Communist party in France are not renowned for being particularly participative. 3.2.3.2 Comments The major finding of our analysis is that political parties’ Web sites are much more likely than the institutional Web sites (whether local authorities or parliaments) to host Web-discursive features. We saw that almost one party out of two hosted an online forum (47.8 percent) and among them 36.4 percent hosted an active and vibrant online forum. This greater interactivity derives probably from two interconnected factors. First, a motivational factor: the political parties being in strong competition with each other—which is not the case of the parliaments and or the cities—are probably more motivated to implement interactive features such as the forum, since this could lead to some electoral gains by conveying a modern and participative image of themselves. And, second, an organizational factor: one can expect that on average the political parties have more facilities to implement an online forum since they generally have a more flexible structure than the parliaments and cities. It is also likely that they perceive a more direct utility in the implementation of online forums, for example for receiving feedback on certain specific issues or for being aware of the opinions of the party’s sympathizers and militants. One can wonder why there are still more than half of the political parties that did not implement an online forum on their Web sites. It is likely that some parties deliberately avoid implementing such participative tools because they consider that opening up their Web site to comments can be a risky business since this would offer the possibility for opponents to use the forum as a Trojan horse to advertise their views or criticize the party itself. It could also could be that some parties, particularly the small ones, avoid implementing a Web forum for cost reasons and because not enough people would visit it. 3.3 Summary and Concluding Remarks In our quest for measuring the potential impact of the virtualization of political debates on the deliberativeness of the political process, we have

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analyzed, on the one hand, the extent to which citizens debate online and, on the other hand, which are the actors that are more likely to host political online debates. Concerning the first question, it has been observed that an increasing number of citizens interact online not only for private purposes but also political purposes. This participation is, however, not equally distributed, varying according to the countries and categories of the population observed. As for the variation among the countries, we compared the usage of the online debates in electoral periods in France and the United States and noted that 4 percent of the American Internet users stated that they had actively discussed politics online during the presidential election of 2004 and the midterm election of 2006, while in France, 17 percent of Internet users reported that visiting online forums was part of their electoral activity. One should, however, not overestimate the differences that are observed between these two countries, for in the case of the U.S. citizens they were asked if they posted comments in online debates, whereas in France citizens were ask if they posted or just read comments. If the same activity had been measured in the two cases it is likely that the scores would tend to be much more similar. Differences were more obvious concerning the categories of citizens who stated that they had participated in online political debates. The survey we conducted among young EU citizens revealed that almost one young EU citizen out of four (24 percent) has posted political comments in online political forums in the last year. Also, the survey completed during the French electoral campaign revealed that the users of online forums were very likely to be strongly interested in the political campaign. These results suggest that the progression of the usage of the online debates could, in its first phase, lead to a reinforcement of the political engagement of citizens who are already politically active but that, in the long run, with the emergence of the young generation and the increasing user-friendliness of the online discursive architecture, the usage of online political forums should become more widespread. Concerning the hosting of online political debates, the Web-content analysis undertaken of the parliamentary, municipal, and political party sites revealed that most of them provided basic interactive features (e-mail), and that differences could be observed in the provision of more elaborate forms of discursive interaction such as the online forums and the online consultation. With regard to the parliament, our investigation, based on the Web-content analysis of 44 European national and regional parliaments (plus the European Parliament), reveals that a basic interactive offer is generally provided (general e-mail, MPs’ e-mail, and contact information) but a more discursive offer (online forums, e-consultations)


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is almost completely absent. For a number of interconnected reasons (financial costs, administrative passivity, political hurdles, etc.), the status quo based on a limited, mostly informative Web offer is preferred to a participative and discursive use of the Internet. Local authorities are slightly more likely than the parliaments to offer possibilities of discursive interaction. Our analysis suggests that the size of the city and the country has an impact on the presence of online forums: larger cities seem to be more likely than small cities to host Web forums and, in the European context, cities from Scandinavian countries (Norway and Sweden) were more likely than their UK and French counterparts to host online forums. Political parties were, in comparison to local authorities and parliament, far more likely to host online forums. The analysis we conducted of 163 political parties in the 25 EU member states reveals that almost one party out of two (47 percent) provided a Web forum and that, among them, the Eastern political parties were more likely to host an online forum than the Western political parties (53.8 percent versus 41.9 percent). Regarding the level of participation within the forums, one party out of three that hosted an online forum had a high rate of participation in its forum. This strong difference in the offer of online forums in favor of the political parties is probably due to the fact that the political parties have a much stronger motivation to host online forums since they are in perpetual competition with other parties and, therefore, have more incentives to implement online interactive features if these are appreciated by their electors. It is also likely that the political parties find a greater utility in the online forum not only for marketing purposes but also for providing new political ideas as well as for gauging the political opinion of their basis. If we connect our findings with the model of deliberative democracy that is the most likely to be promoted by the virtualization of the debates, the high online discursive offer of the parties, the limited discursive offer of the cities, and the low discursive offer of the parliaments suggest that the critical model of democracy is the one that is most likely to be spontaneously promoted by the virtualization of the debates. This model suggests that the debates should take place within the framework of civil society since they are the only discursive contexts that can play the role of critical public space. For the advocates of such an approach, the concentration of the online debates in the civil society is a positive evolution for it signifies that the state structure will not end up colonizing the discursive activity that would otherwise take place in civil society. This is an interpretation that would, however, need to be further scrutinized by analyzing, on the one hand, the extent to which other actors of civil society (NGOs, political associations, blogs) implement and use online forums, and on

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the other hand, by assessing whether civil society associations are really contexts that promote deliberative forms of debates. Finally, a question that still remains unanswered is whether the virtualization of the debates contributes to connecting, in a deliberative way, the debates that take place in the framework of the civil society to the state structure that have the legislative and decisional power. Our empirical investigation suggests that both the parliaments and the local authorities did not seriously envisage offering such opportunities through the Internet since they almost never provided any possibility of e-consultation features. This is probably a missed opportunity, because we do not believe, as suggested by Dryzeck, that deliberative forms of debate cannot occur in state structures. A consultation—whether face-to-face or on the Web—organized by a parliament is likely to be as deliberative, if not more deliberative, than the one organized by a civil society association. It is also likely to have a more direct impact on the decision-making process.

Chapter 4

Existing Findings on the Deliberativeness of the Web Debates Despite the novelty of the topic, research aiming at evaluating the level of deliberation of online debates has rapidly gained a great interest among the academic community. A reading of the literature reveals that several researchers have already attempted to analyze the functioning and deliberativeness of a great variety of online debates such as political newsgroups (Schneider 1997; Hill & Hughes 1998; Wilhelm 1999; Davis 1999; Hangemann 2002; Bentivegna 1998; Dumoulin 2003; Fuchs 2006), Web forums of political parties, cities, or associations (Tanner 2001; Tsaliki 2002; Desquinado 2007; Wojcik 2006; Jankowski & Van Os 2002, Greffet & Wojcik 2008), Web forums hosted by mass media (Schultz 2000; Berdal 2004), e-consultation forums (Beierle 2002; Coleman 2002; Hansard Society 2006; Albrecht 2003; Monnoyer-Smith 2004), as well as experimental Web forums that generally promote forms of debates that involve, at the same time, politicians and ordinary citizens (Jensen 2003a; Jankowski & Van Selm, 2000). While such efforts are useful in order to explain the discursive dynamics of specific cases, they are problematic for reaching a global understanding of the deliberativeness of the online debates and their potential impact on the opinion and decision-making process. This chapter sets up a first attempt to summarize and compare, in a systematic way, the main results obtained by precedent studies. From a descriptive perspective, this comparative analysis is useful since it describes the variety of existing online forums and the methods of investigation in order to measure their level of deliberation. From an exploratory perspective, the results obtained through this analysis help reach a broader understanding of

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the deliberativeness of the online debates by observing, at a basic level, whether the online debates can be deliberative at all and, at a more advanced level, whether the level of deliberativeness varies according to certain contextual factors. Particularly, we will analyze whether what we define as the external impact factor is positively correlated with the deliberativeness of the debates. This hypothesis, which we already formulated elsewhere (Janssen & Kies 2005), and has since then also been mentioned and discussed by Thompson (2008), postulates that if ordinary citizens believe what they write could have an impact on the decision-making process, they will be more motivated in adopting a deliberative attitude. This means that they should be more motivated to read and react to the comments formulated by other participants (reciprocity), to justify their opinions (justification), to critically examine their own opinions (reflexivity), to be sensitive to other opinions and views (empathy), to be sincere (sincerity), and to reach an agreement (search for agreement). Additionally, since it is a discursive context that is perceived to have an impact on the decision-making process, it should also attract a plurality of voices (Kies & Kriesi 2005), particularly if the discursive architecture promotes inclusion and the discursive equality. By contrast, it is relevant to note that Thompson argues that the potential impact of a discussion space may generate the opposite effect: “Participants may act more strategically; show less tolerance for opponents, and take more extreme positions” (2008, 503). We believe that this can be the case for debates, such as parliamentary debates, where important decisions are at stake and where participants defend interests that are hardly negotiable. However, we do not believe that this hypothesis works in cases—such as the ones we study—where participants are ordinary citizens and where no immediate political decisions are taken. 4.1

Method of Analysis

The chapter will test the external impact hypothesis by looking at the results of ten existing studies that measure the deliberativeness of the online debates in different contexts. These latter have been distinguished from the viewpoint of their potential impact on the decision-making process and from the viewpoint of the categories of actors they belong to. The first distinction allows evaluation for each deliberative criterion whether they are affected by the external impact factor while the second distinction (media forum, civil societies, and political parties forum and experimental and institutional forums) aims to provide some initial data concerning the way the online debates could contribute to the realization of an efficient model of deliberative democracy. It is important to specify

First Findings on Web Deliberation

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that the explicative ambition of such a broad comparative effort is limited insofar as the case studies analyzed are not necessarily representative of the categories they stem from and because they use different deliberative criteria and methods for operationalizing them. Note also that the case studies analyzed are based on different discursive platforms which facilitates an evaluation of the deliberativeness of the online debates that is not just based on one type of discursive platform, but that can be problematic when testing the external impact hypothesis insofar as the deliberativeness of the online debates may also be influenced by their discursive architectures and rules. Some studies evaluate newsgroups, which are generally free and unmoderated, others evaluate Web forums, that are generally hosted by the Web site of a specific institution and tend to be moderated, while others evaluate experimental/e-consultation forums whose agenda tends to be controlled and that are generally governed by strict rules of moderation and identification. For this reason, when testing the external impact hypothesis, one should be aware of the existence of intervening variables that could explain divergences of the deliberativeness of the debates, such as the moderation rules, the identification policy, the control of the agenda, and the nature and ideology of the institutions hosting the online debates. We will now provide a comprehensive description of the case studies analyzed by starting with the forums that have a low external impact (weak publics) and pursue with the forums that have higher external impact (strong publics). We considered that six of them had a limited external impact, while the other four had a stronger external impact. For each study, we indicate the nature of the actors analyzed, the number of comments scrutinized as well as the period and method of investigation. Concerning the public that has a low external impact, the following four empirical analyses were selected: (1) the analysis of four partisan newsgroups affiliated to different Italian political parties and coalitions: the democratic party of the left (DS), the political coalition of the centerleft (Ulivo), the political coalition of the right headed by Forza Italia (Polo), and the postfascist political party (Alleanza Nazionale). All messages that were sent in the four newsgroups over a period of one month (September 1997) were scrutinized. This corresponds to a total of 783 messages (Bentivegna 1998); (2) the analysis of ten U.S. newsgroups that were randomly selected (six were typical newsgroups and four were discussion lists drawn from the commercial Web site America Online). From each newsgroup, 50 consequent messages were randomly selected over the same period (October 1996) and were evaluated through content analysis (Wilhelm 1999); (3) the analysis of three Canadian newsgroups, of

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which two are based on topics of political interest—“Western Thoughts of Separation,” which promotes the independence of western provinces of Canada and “Avant-Garde Quebec,” which promotes the political sovereignty of Québec—and the last one, “Gay right,” is based on a topic of social interest. For each newsgroup, 201 messages, selected during the month of November 2001, were evaluated through content analysis (Dumoulin 2003); and (4) the analysis of a successful Austrian newsgroup “politik-forum.at,” which in May 2006 had approximately 2,300 registered users and 80,840 messages. This analysis focuses specifically on the discussion board regarding national politics that holds about 10,700 postings. The author analyzed, through content analysis, all threads that got started during one specific month (January 2006). This was summarized in a sample of 28 threads and a total of 754 messages (Fuchs 2006). Also, in the category of the forums that have a limited external impact, two studies based on the Web forums of newspapers and magazines were also selected: (1) the online forum of New York Times and the way its journalists interacted with their readers through e-mail. The investigation is based on a questionnaire sent to 50 journalists (19 responded) and a survey sent in October 1997 to 100 users of the forum that were randomly selected (59 percent responded) (Schultz 2000); and (2) the Web forums of three major newspapers/magazines, Spiegel Online (SOF), Debattcentralen (DC), and Guardian Unlimited Talk (GUT). The analysis is based on an online questionnaire sent to the users and on interviews with the moderators of the forums (Berdal 2004). Finally, concerning the experimental and e-consultations forums, four case studies were selected: (1) the Danish government-sponsored Web forum Nordpol which had the ambition to increase citizens’ interest in politics and to strengthen the dialogue among citizens and politicians just before regional election of 2001. The research is based on content analysis as well as on survey data of the participants. A total of 239 postings were scrutinized, a little more than half of the debate. Of the 239 postings, 59 percent originated from politicians (Jensen 2003a); (2) the analysis of an e-consultation forum organized by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) aiming to obtain inputs for its draft Public Involvement Policy (PIP). The forum lasted 11 days (July 10 to July 20, 2001). By the end of the dialogue 1,166 people from all over the country registered to participate. A total of 1,261 postings were provided by 320 people. The analysis is essentially based on a survey of the users of the forum (Beierle 2002); (3) the German project “Demos,” an online deliberative consultation organized by the city of Hamburg in November 2002. The objective was to raise ideas for the development of a strategic vision


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for the future development of the city. The most interesting ideas were selected by a jury and their contributors were invited to meet the mayor to present and discuss the ideas. The debate was broadly advertised in the local media. In the end, 538 users had registered for the debate, eliciting a total contribution of 3,907 messages. The study is essentially based on survey (70 people responded) (Albrecht 2003); and (4) the UK project “Tellparliament,” which is an experimental Web site implemented by the Hansard Society that hosts e-consultation forums on demand of the committee of the House of Commons or the Chamber of Lords. So far, the Web site has hosted five e-consultation forums.1 The forums lasted between three and eight weeks, the number of registered users varied from 81 to 335, and the number of messages sent varied from 42 to 554. The evaluation is based on a survey, open-ended questions to participants, and interviews with people responsible for the implementation of the project (Hansard Society 2006). These different case studies have been measured on the basis of six deliberative criteria: reciprocity, justification, plurality, empathy, reflexivity, and external impact. As already mentioned, the significance of our comparative analysis is necessarily limited for not all the deliberative criteria have been gauged, and because the different studies that were selected did not measure all the six deliberative criteria we identified and rarely operationalized them in the same way. The criterion of reciprocity has been assessed in two different ways. At a basic level, the criterion of reciprocity measures the proportion of posts that are part of thread versus the ones that initiate a thread (R1). Such a measure is revelatory of the ability and willingness of the Web discussants to find a common issue of discussion. At a more progressive level, the criterion of reciprocity aims to observe the extent to which a post takes into consideration arguments and opinions of a precedent posting (R2). This measure is an important revelator of the deliberativeness of the debates insofar as a genuine and constructive debate can only emerge if participants listen to each other. The criterion of justification has also been assessed at two different levels; on a basic level by observing whether the opinions expressed in a forum are justified (or not) (J1) and, at a more advanced level, by assessing the elaborateness of the justifications (J2). The criterion of plurality has been assessed in three different ways: (i) on the basis of the content of the messages themselves (PC); (ii) on the basis of the plurality of the topics defining the agenda (PA); and (iii) on the basis of the sociodemographic profile of the users (generally active ones). For the plurality based on the sociodemographic profiles, it is possible to distinguish two evaluative standards. First, the “inclusive plurality” (Inc.P), which evaluates whether citizens who do not belong to a specific institution or who are

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generally not listened to on some specific topics will use the Internet to express their opinions, questions, or concerns. Second, the “institutional plurality” (Inst.P), which evaluates whether participants in a discussion space reflect the sociodemographic profile of the citizens who usually belong to or are in contact with the institutions to which the discussion space is affiliated. This institutional plurality requires, for example, that the user panel of the Web forum of a newspaper should be representative of its readers and that the users of a political party’s Web forum should be representative of its sympathizers and voters. The deliberative criterion of empathy was generally assessed by just looking at the respect shown in the messages. It looks at the proportion of messages that were insulting, ridiculing, or injurious and sometimes compares them with the proportion of messages that revealed concerns for the opinions and needs of fellow citizens. The criterion of reflexivity measures the extent to which online debates have increased the knowledge and/or influenced the initial opinions of its participants (active or passive). This has been measured in a deductive way by looking at the scores of the deliberative criteria of plurality and reciprocity and by asking directly to the participants (generally through online surveys) whether they feel more informed and have changed their mind after participating in the online debates. Finally, the criterion of external impact measures the extent to which the debates that took place in the forums influenced, directly or indirectly, debates and political decisions taken outside the forum. Depending on the context where it was measured and the choices of the researcher, this criterion has been measured in different ways. It has been measured by looking at the sociodemographic profile of the users, through interviews and surveys of the people that were likely to be influenced, and by looking at concrete outcomes of the debates, such as the one on draft policies. 4.2

Findings

The table that follows offers a global view of the scores obtained by the different empirical studies for each deliberative criterion. For each criterion an analysis comparing the results obtained by the different studies is proposed. 4.2.1 Reciprocity

Regarding the basic level of reciprocity (R1), the latter scored high both for the weak publics (with low external impact) and the strong publics (with high external impact). For the weak publics the analysis of the four partisan newsgroups (Bentivegna 1998) and the three Canadian newsgroups

Table 4.1 Ten studies on deliberativeness of online debates Justification

Plurality

Empathy

Reflexivity

External Impact

R1. High R2: / R1: / R2: Low

/

PA: High

High

/

/

J1: High J2: /

PC: Low

/

Low

/

R1: High R2: Low R1: / R2: High /

/

PC: Medium

Medium

Low

/

J1: High J2: Low /

Low /

/ /

/ Medium

/

/

PC: High Inc. P: Low Inst P: Medium Inc. P: Low Inst. P: Medium

/

/

Medium

E-consultation and experimental forums Environmental Protection Agency R1: High (Beierle 2002) R2: High Nordpol (Jensen 2003a) R1: High R2: High Demos Project (Albrecht 2003) / Tellparliament (Hansard 2006) /

/

High

High

High

J1: High J2: /

Inc. P: Low Inst. P: High Inc. P: Medium

High

High

High

/ /

Inc. P: Medium Inc. P: High

High /

High /

/ High


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R1: Proportion of contributions in a same thread R2: Proportion of contributions referring to the content of precedent message J1: Proportion of messages containing a justification J2: Level of justification PA: Plurality of agenda (diversity of topics discussed) PC: Plurality based on content of the contributions Inc. P: Inclusive plurality Inst. P: Institutional plurality


Weak Publics 3 Italian newsgroups (Bentivegna 1998) 10 U.S. newsgroups (Wilhelm 1999) 3 Canadian newsgroups (Dumoulin 2003) Austrian newsgroup (Fuchs 2006) Web forum and e-mail of NYT (Schultz 2003) Web forums of 3 newspapers (Berdal 2004)

Reciprocity

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(Dumoulin 2003) revealed that, on average, almost seven messages out of ten were replies to precedent messages. Similarly, for the Danish governmental Web forum Nordpol, 70 percent of the messages were a reply to a precedent message, and for the consultation organized by the Environmental Protection Agency, 83 percent of all the messages were part of a thread. These findings suggest that, generally, the online debates are based on a majority of replies and a minority of postings that initiate a new topic. This tendency, however, is not constant. For instance, Bentivegna noticed important divergences in the level of reciprocity among the political parties’ newsgroups. Particularly, the newsgroup affiliated to the right party “Alleanza Nazionale” presents a low level of reciprocity (34 percent). Bentivegna suggests that this difference indicates the existence of a true difficulty in finding common issues for discussion, but also that it may be related to the presence of a moderator “who, while on the one hand prevents the ‘flaming’ and the ‘crosspost’ operations … on the other hand weakens the discussion to the point of making it irrelevant” (1997, 5). Concerning the more reflexive and meaningful type of reciprocity (R2), the results are more divergent. Concerning the weak publics, Wilhelm found that for the ten American newsgroups he analyzed, just one message out of five represented a genuine reply to a previous posting. This signifies, he believes, that “rather than listening to others, more often than not persons opposed to a seed message used it to amplify their own views” (Wilhelm 1999, 171). He suggests that this may due to the fact that “there is no obligation to respond on the part of either latent or active forum participants … since messages are not addressed to any particular respondents, there is no imperative to respond on the part of an anonymous addressee” (idem, 171). Similarly, Dumoulin (2003) observed that participants are not really considering with due respect the arguments of the senders to whom they reply. He compares the type of conversation to “interactive monologue,” in which each participant wants to express their opinions without really considering the arguments of the other participants. However, this absence of genuine reciprocity cannot be generalized for all the newsgroups. In the case of the successful Austrian newsgroup political-forum.at, almost 80 percent of the messages were replies to precedent posts (Fuchs, 2006). More positive results of genuine reciprocity are to be found in the government-sponsored forums that include citizens and politicians and the e-consultation forums. Concerning the Danish government-sponsored forum Nordpol, Jensen found that half of the posts (49.4 percent) were genuinely reciprocal and that politicians tended to be more reciprocal than the citizens. Among the posts that were reciprocal, a great majority (85 percent) were labeled as “progress” which means that “another posting


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is taken into account and the debater tries to bring the debate forward by reflecting and bringing in new positions, arguments and points” (Jensen 2003a, 38). A minority of posts (9.3 percent) were labeled as persuasion, which means that “the poster seemed to be persuaded by another poster’s opinions or arguments” (idem, 38). Finally, there were just 5.1 percent of posts that were labeled as radicalization, which suggests that “another posting is taken into consideration in a negative manner; the debater radicalizes his/her points and/or the disagreements are augmented” (idem, 38). According to Jensen, this absence of radicalization suggests that “only a limited number of quarrels took place and that the participants in general were considerate and respectful to each other” (idem, 38). The presence of reciprocity among citizens and politicians is further confirmed by a survey that reveals that 59 percent of the respondents felt that “the politicians listen to the citizens and act accordingly” while only 15 percent show “little confidence” (idem, 41). Regarding the e-consultation forums, Beierle found that the e-consultation forum organized by the Environmental Protection Agency was reciprocal: “After the first day, when people were simply introducing themselves rather than replying to earlier messages, the level of messages that were replies to previous messages leveled off 50 percent to 75 percent of messages each day” (2002, 37). As revealing factor of the reciprocity, he observed that in many cases “participants assisted each other in finding information and getting answers to questions” (idem, 36). The fact that a genuine type of reciprocity was always high for the strong publics and tended to be low for the weak publics suggests that the external impact hypothesis is verified. This implies that in deliberative contexts where citizens believe that their voice can lead to concrete outcomes—such as widely read governmental forums or influential e-consultation forums—citizens are keener to listen and reply to each other than in contexts, such as newsgroups, where the opinions are unlikely to have an influence. These findings should, however, not be interpreted too strictly. As suggested by the Austrian newsgroup political-forum.at, there can be situations in which the level of reciprocity is high even if the impact of the forum is likely to be low. In this case, there are others factors that motivate people to enter into interactive debates: there are, for instance, always people who have a natural inclination to debate seriously about political matters regardless of the fact that they may have no influence. 4.2.2 Justification

The criterion of justification has not been broadly assessed. Among the weak publics for which justification has been assessed, the Austrian

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newsgroup analyzed by Fuchs (2006) reveals that an important number of opinions were justified but only an extreme minority provided a rather complex justification. In fact, the vast majority of the posts including an opinion did not provide any argument (25.8 percent) or provided just one argument (69.7 percent). Only a very small minority of them contained two (3.6 percent) or three or more arguments (0.9 percent). This shows, according to him, that “most users in political online debate didn’t try to ground their opinions and ideas by looking for and communicating multiple reasons. There is a lack of complex arguments” (Fuchs 2006, 21). Wilhelm as well found that the opinions expressed in the U.S. newsgroups were frequently justified: “About three (opinions) out of four provide reasons to justify their statements” (1997, 173). He suggests that this high proportion of justified opinions could emerge because, unlike face-to-face interactions, users had time to compose their messages in relative isolation and anonymity. He, however, does not assess the complexity of their argumentation. Dealing now with the more influential discussion spaces, Jensen found that in the government-sponsored forum, where politicians were active, the level of justification was also likely to be high. On the one hand, he observed that the postings were generally long, which suggests, according to him, the presence of argumentation: “It is like ‘letter to the editor’—or a consultancy-based exchange of arguments with relatively few, but long, postings within each thread” (Jensen 2003a, 34). He also observed that a vast majority of the opinions were based on argumentation (81 percent). The arguments were generally validated on the basis of personal information, opinion, and views (51.8 percent) versus external information, sources, and arguments (30.3 percent). Finally, it appears that the politicians were slightly more likely to be argumentative than citizens. Yet he does not say anything that concerns the complexity of the argumentations. These three examples are too limited to draw any conclusion due to the extent to which the external impact would be positively correlated with the level of justification. Nevertheless, they suggest that the pessimistic thesis, according to which the online discursive context is unlikely to host debates that are based on justified argumentations, is not verified. Further investigations should be conducted to evaluate more deeply the potential impact of the weak/strong distinction on the presence and the level of justification. According to us, the intensity of its effect is likely to be stronger for the complexity of justification than for the level of justification. In other words, we suggest that, in a discursive context that is likely to have a strong external impact, ordinary citizens will be


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more motivated to justify their opinions in an elaborated way than in a discursive context that has a low external impact. 4.2.3 Plurality

Plurality is the only deliberative criterion that all the empirical investigations analyzed. Yet they did not all look at it equally. The studies based on newsgroups (weak publics) evaluated the level of plurality by analyzing the content of the messages (PC) and the diversity of topics initiated by the threads (PA), while the studies that focused on media and e-consultation and experimental forums evaluated the plurality on the basis of the sociodemographic profile of the passive and active users of the forum. The level of plurality based on the content of the messages (PC) diverged highly among the three newsgroups that measured it. Wilhelm found that the U.S. newsgroups generally reflect a “community of interest,” which means that the messages of a same newsgroup globally adhere “to key political objectives, such as solidarity toward a candidate, party platform, issue or ideology” (1999, 166). According to him, this finding “supports the view that individuals tend to seek out those individuals (and affiliation) with whom they agree” (idem, 171). Differently, Dumoulin, who used the same categorization for measuring plurality, found much more nuanced results. Two of its Canadian newsgroups (Gay Right and Western Thoughts of Separation) tended to be plural. And the last one, which promoted the independence of Quebec, was slightly more homogeneous. It was the only one in which the dissidents’ messages were strongly criticized and rejected. These divergent findings suggest that newsgroups do not necessarily host debates among like-minded people. This is further confirmed by the analysis of Fuchs, who observed that, in an Austrian newsgroup, debates were not dominated by any partisan ideology2 and that citizens referred to a plurality of political values in their argumentations. Concretely, only 16 percent of the messages expressed a political affiliation3 and almost double (30.3 percent) referred to a great variety of political values, which,4 according to the author, suggests that “morals hence seem to be an important aspect of political online debate” (Fuchs 2006, 21). The plurality based on the agenda of the debates (PA) is another strategy for assessing the plurality of the newsgroups that has been adopted for analyzing Italian newsgroups affiliated to political parties. The analysis reveals that plurality was present insofar as the people discussed a great variety of topics that essentially stem from the media, which, according to Bentivegna, “bears witness to a lively interest as well as a clear willingness to talk about issues relevant to the country with all people, not just with

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those belonging to the same political group” (1998, 8). Interestingly, she found that “the personal experience and popular wisdom do not contribute in a significant way to the selection of issues, even though they can contribute to the articulation of the discussion” (idem, 8). In other words, these findings suggest that the political parties to which the newsgroups are affiliated do not dominate and determine the agenda of the discussions that are taking place. It is not clear, however, how plural the debates will be around these different topics. In fact, it is not because a great variety of topics appears in the discussion table that these latter will be the object of plural and contradictory debates. The plurality based on the sociodemographic profile of the users has been assessed for the forums of the media and the ones organized in the framework of experimental and e-consultation procedures. Concerning the discussion spaces hosted by the media, Schultz (2000) observed that the active users of the forum of the New York Times were mainly male subjects (81 percent) and highly educated: over half of the respondents had a master or doctorate degree! In another study that compared the users of the forums of important newspapers/magazines in three different countries, Berdal (2004) observed that the users of the forum were also generally men. Additionally, he noted that while a certain amount of respondents were members of a political organization (mean 22.5 percent) almost none of the participants at the forum held a political position by election. In absence of more precise sociodemographic data, it is reasonable to consider that these forums score low from the viewpoint of the “inclusive plurality” (Inc.P) and that they score medium from the viewpoint of the “institutional plurality” (Inst.P). The fact that the users of the newspapers’ forums tend to be highly educated and politically involved are signs suggesting that the users of the newspapers’ forums are at least partly representative of the readership of these different newspapers. More elaborated data on the sociodemographic profile of the users have been gathered for the strong publics. This is the case of the Danish governmental forum (Nordpol) that aimed, just before the regional elections of 2001, to encourage young voters to become politically more active. This study reveals that participants tended to be male (70.7 percent), highly educated, students (35.4 percent), “white-collar workers and civil servants” (35.4 percent), and very active Internet users (89 percent). Finally, the largest group of participants can be found within the secondand third-time voters (23 to 29 years old). While the participants are not representative of the Danish population at large, it is the case that the standards fixed by the inclusive plurality (PSD1) have been partly reached insofar as the forum has attracted citizens who are generally


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politically passive, that is, the young voters who were the main focus of the experimental forum. This inclusiveness, however, cannot be considered to be high insofar as some of the users of the forum were already politically active: 25 percent were members of a political party and 10 percent were members of a political organization.5 A greater inclusiveness of the participation has been observed for the Demos e-consultation conducted in the city of Hamburg and for the e-consultations realized by the Hansard Society in the framework of the project Tellparliament. The German project Demos reveals that among the participants appeared an overrepresentation of young adults (18–26 and 27–40 year olds) while the surveys realized on the five consultations requested by the UK parliaments disclosed that citizens who were generally not in contact with the MPs and/or the parliament had been reached.6 From a gender perspective, the data reveal that female subjects—generally absent from the (online) political debates—were more numerous in certain e-consultation forums, particularly when these were related to societal issues.7 Finally, considering the e-consultation forum realized for the Environmental Protection Agency, the survey realized by Beierle reveals that “participants were not representative of the broader U.S. population in terms of age, education, race, and computer usage” (2002, 10). He also observed that this e-consultation practice tended to reach the usual suspects since “participants reported to be very familiar with EPA and its public participation processes.” According to the author, “this created a tension between the benefits of having a highly experienced group of participants and the disadvantage that the experts were just talking to each other” (idem, 10). In other words, these findings imply that the inclusive plurality was not reached but that the institutional plurality has been deepened since the e-consultation debates had attracted a greater number of citizens interested or involved in the policy of the Environmental Protection Agency. As indicated by Beierle, “the dialogue clearly reached a much larger and geographically diverse group than could ever had participate in person” (idem, 10). Is it possible to affirm on the basis of these results that the external impact factor has an impact on plurality? In other words, can we say that political forums that are likely to have a political impact (experimental and e-consultation forums) are more likely to become plural than political forums that are unlikely to have such an influence (newsgroups and media forums)? As for the criterion of justification, the nature of the case studies analyzed and the methodology they use are too divergent to derive from them any convincing conclusion concerning the specific influence of the external impact factor. These data, however, indicate other factors that are likely to influence the level of plurality. In particular,

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these findings reveal that political affiliation may influence the plurality of debates. This point is suggested by the study of Dumoulin which reveals that the newsgroups related to the independence of Quebec were less likely to be plural than the two other newsgroups (Gay Right and Western Thoughts of Separation); it is also suggested by the analysis of the e-consultations of the Chamber of Lords, which revealed that, depending of the topics, the participation of female subjects varied. In order to evaluate the influence of the external impact on the plurality, one should be granted the possibility to compare similar content and sociodemographic profiles of online debates that diverge only from the viewpoint of the external impact. By verifying our hypothesis, one should find out that forums of discussion that have a strong impact are likely foster the appearance and confrontation of plurality of opinions for the simple reason that all the persons who have a particular interest for the issues discussed should be more motivated to express an opinion and stand up for it in this specific discussion space.8 4.2.4 Empathy

The criterion of empathy, which requires participants to be sensitive to other views and opinions, has been assessed just through an evaluation of the level of respect. This scored very differently according to the newsgroups analyzed. Fuchs (2006), who analyzed a generalist Austrian political newsgroup, observed that almost half of the messages (46.8 percent) were polemical, aggressive, or cynical.9 He also observed that 27 percent of the messages were based on personal attacks insofar as they were insulting or disparaging other users or using a violent tone. He suggests that this rather important tendency to violate the principles of respectful listening is due to the “disinhibiting” effect of the online communication that is based on anonymity and to the presence of an extreme right community that is likely to have contributed to the degeneration of the debates. To a lesser extent, instances of absence of respect were also observed with important variations in the three Canadian newsgroups analyzed by Dumoulin (2003). He observed that 18.3 percent of the messages were “nonpertinent” (i.e., not related to the thematic of the forum) and 11 percent of the messages were “injurious.” The proportion of negative messages was particularly present in the newsgroup based on the gay community rights. The fact that this issue is particularly sensitive and refers to personal values is, according to Dumoulin, the reason why the injurious messages were numerous in this forum. He, however, noticed the presence of a successful dynamic of automoderation that was initiated by the users of the newsgroups. Bentivegna finally observed that the level of


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respect was relatively high in the four Italian political parties’ newsgroups: “The prevailing tone of discussions seemed to be based upon the respect for the speaker—who is only rarely insulted or even attacked—and upon the desire to participate in the discussion, asking and offering information or soliciting opinions” (1998, 7). According to her measure, only 9.6 percent of the messages were tagged “flaming,” and no important divergences were observed among the newsgroups. Not much can be said about the level of respect of the newspapers’ Web forums. Schultz (2000) did not measure it and Berdal (2004) just provides a superficial indication of it by asking in his survey whether the users considered “that some postings sabotage the discussion.” Unsurprisingly, more than half of the respondents replied affirmatively. This result is, however, not comparable to the ones that are based on content analysis for its vague formulation—some postings—does not offer a fine-grained understanding of the extent to which debates were characterized by an absence of respect. Probably the main finding concerning the level of respect is that it was high for all the e-consultation and experimental forums. Concerning the Danish government-sponsored forum Nordpol, which included citizens and politicians, the tone was respectful, according to Jensen. He observed that only 5 percent were specifically hateful and that compared to a successful newsgroup “dk.politik,” the tone was clearly superior. He also observed that politicians tended to be more respectful than citizens. He suggests that “the presence of politicians seems to have contributed to the respectful tone and the factuality of the debate” (Jensen 2003a, 46) even if the presence of politicians can also be problematic insofar that “it can limit the citizens’ eagerness to engage in discussion with other citizens” (idem, 46). A similar positive deliberative tone is also evident in the e-consultation conducted by the EPA and the one conducted by the city of Hamburg through the Demos project. Concerning the EPA consultation, 86 percent of the respondents agreed or strongly agreed that communication was respectful and only 1 percent disagreed with this statement. Beierle (2002) observed, for instance, that the debates were characterized by a high level of politeness10 and a willingness to reach a common and thorough understanding of the issues debated. Concerning the Demos project, Albrecht observed that the debates were characterized by an “argumentative culture” and a “high degree of discipline among the communicating participants.” He believes that such a culture could emerge because “there were mechanisms to foster communicative discipline and to replace the social control available in offline debates” (Albrecht 2003, 18). These mechanisms were, on the one hand, a widely accessible document explaining the rules of conduct and, on the other hand, a team of four moderators who were highly contributory

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during the entire debate (their contribution share was 12.4 percent). His conclusion is that “all in all, the mechanisms established a constructive atmosphere of mutual respect and rational orientation that made it unattractive for individuals to break the rules” (idem, 18). The fact that the level of respect was high for all e-consultations/ experimental forums and diverged significantly among the newsgroups analyzed suggests that our external impact hypothesis was particularly successful for explaining the divergences observed for the deliberative criterion of respect. This would signify that, if participants believe that their participation in the debates is likely to have a concrete political impact, they would be more willing to adopt a respectful attitude. Another reason may derive from the fact that the strong publics, by being more visible and potentially read by influential citizens, correspond to a particular context of debate that prevent participants from being rude or aggressive. One could compare the newsgroups to debates taking place in a pub and the strong publics to debates taking place in a salon. The context of the bar encourages a more uncontrolled and familiar behavior, while the context of the salon invites participants to adopt a more moderate behavior. Finally, as suggested by some case studies, it is also likely that the rules of participation, such as the identification and moderation policies that are generally stricter in the e-consultation/experimental forums, also contribute to fostering a respectful dynamic within the debates. 4.2.5 Reflexivity

The criterion of reflexivity, which evaluates whether citizens have changed their minds or increased their knowledge on a specific issue, has been superficially assessed for the studies focusing on newsgroups. Among the four studies based on the newsgroups, two did not measure it—the one on the Italian political parties’ newsgroups (Bentivegna 1998) and the one based on the Austrian newsgroup (Fuchs 2006)—and two other studies—the ones on U.S. newsgroups (Wilhelm 1999) and Canadian newsgroups (Dumoulin 2003)—measured it in a purely deductive way. It is suggested that the level of reflexivity is positively correlated with the level of reciprocity and plurality of the debates. According to this interpretation, the presence of reciprocity implies that people reflect on the contributions of others, and the presence of plurality implies that the debates are based on different opinions. Wilhelm, who observed that the ten newsgroups he analyzed were weak from the perspective of plurality and reciprocity, and Dumoulin, who observed that its three newsgroups were strong in plurality but low in reciprocity, considered that the debates did not foster reflexive dynamics. Wilhelm concluded that newsgroups “neither cultivate nor


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iterate a public opinion that is the considered judgment of persons whose preferences have be contested in the course of public gathering”(1999, 175). Similarly, Dumoulin suggests that the impact on personal opinion can just be low since there is no instance where arguments of others are taken with serious concern. Such measurements are not precise enough for being affirmative about the reflexive impact of the debates. For instance, in a case such as the one of Dumoulin that is characterized by a high rate of plurality and low rate of reciprocity, one could well imagine that certain participants—not necessarily active ones—will change their mind or will feel more informed about some specific topics without necessarily expressing themselves through a posting in the forum. The analysis that focuses on the strong publics allows a more direct and convincing evaluation of reflexivity for they attempt to grasp the invisible character of reflexivity through interviews and surveys. Jensen has measured the reflexive impact of the Danish-government-sponsored forum Nordpol by questioning participants whether they felt more informed after participating at the forum. The result is positive, for more than half of the citizens who answered the survey felt that they knew more about county politics while 40 percent felt more qualified to vote (2003a). Similarly, the consultation realized by the Environmental Protection Agency is also perceived to have had a relatively important impact on the level of information of its participants since more than three users out of four (76 percent) declared to have learned from each other’s opinions (Beierle 2002, 44). The UK e-consultations (Tellparliament) were also perceived to have a strong internal impact: 79 percent of the respondents said they “learned something new from reading other messages that were posted.” Also, a small but noteworthy group of respondents (17 percent) indicated that “they changed their mind or opinion in some way.” Interestingly, 43 percent of those who found the consultation worthwhile posted no messages at all, “suggesting that the value of these exercises is not purely expressive” (Hansard Society 2006, 15). In sum, the external impact hypothesis seems to also work for the deliberative criterion of reflexivity, for the users of experimental/e-consultation forums generally replied that they felt more informed about the topics discussed and that they sometimes changed their minds. In contrast, the level of reflexivity of the weak publics appears to be rather low. This divergence of reflexivity—that, however, should be confirmed by harmonizing the methods of analysis—can be explained by the discursive structure of the e-consultation/experimental forums that are generally designed in order to foster an informative and constructive dynamic of discussion. It may also be that the potential impact of the debates motivates certain participants to adopt a reflexive attitude. For example, in the case of an

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e-consultation forum, several citizens may be inclined to adopt a reflexive attitude in order to formulate propositions that are well justified and widely shared by the other participants. Such an attitude would raise the chances that this proposition will hold the attention of the organizers of the consultation. 4.2.6 External Impact

The newsgroups’ analysis did not attempt to evaluate the external impact. This absence of interest in measuring the external impact reflects, on the one hand, a research choice suggesting that the question of the external impact does not apply to the newsgroups and, on the other hand, an objective difficulty in measuring it for the newsgroups, corresponding to discursive contexts where participants are generally unindentified and where the targets of the debates are unclear and frequently changing. Wilhelm, the only researcher to have mentioned the question for the newsgroups, suggests that the external impact can only be low because the newsgroups “do not provide viable sounding boards for signaling and thematizing issues to be processed by the political system” (1999, 175). In other words, according to Wilhelm, external impact can only be very limited because no constructive idea or proposition is likely to emerge from debates in the newsgroups. A slightly clearer assessment of the external impact was realized in the studies focusing on newspapers’ and magazines’ Web forums. Schultz (2000) observed to what extent the readers for the New York Times were able to influence its journalists directly, by sending an e-mail, or indirectly, through the newspaper’s Web forum. Concerning the e-mail, he found that the journalists were rather favorable to such interaction, for their quality is considered to be generally constructive and inspiring. For instance, a journalist noted: “Once in a while I get a reader email that leads to a story. That’s the main reason I read them” (Schultz 2000, 213). While journalists seem to pay certain attention to the e-mails, the large majority of them declared to never have visited the forum. It is a phenomenon that Schultz deplores, for wider interaction with the readership could, in his view, lead to a much more informative and attractive system of mass information.11 Another strategy for evaluating the external impact, the one of Berdal, looks at the “diffusion” and “networking” effect of its Web forums. Berdal suggests that the forums of the three newspapers that were investigated should have a certain external impact since a relatively important number of participants declared to have participated in other newspapers’ online forums (the average score for the three newspapers is 45 percent). The impact on the decision-making process is, however, likely to be very limited since


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just a minority of the users declares to be politically active in a political organization (the average of the three forums is around 20 percent) and almost none of the users hold a political position by election (the average of three is around 3 percent). It is obvious that the impact perceived by Berdal is marginal at best. There is no guaranty that the users of an online forum will diffuse ideas and opinions that they have encountered to other forums, and likewise there is no guaranty that a political representative will refer to ideas that he encountered in a newspaper’s online forum. Finally, the external impact of the strong publics was considered to be generally high. Concerning the Danish Nordpol experiment, the external impact was evaluated as strong, for many politicians participated at the debates and because the project was promoted by other media and was closely connected to the regional election campaign. The content and formulation of the messages themselves revealed that the debates were aiming at reaching concrete results, for a majority (of the posts) represents attempts to bring issues to the political agenda (60 percent). And in some cases, this has resulted in a specific political initiative (Jensen 2003b, 364–365). Concerning the consultation organized by the Environment Protection Agency, the external impact was also reported to be relatively high. The survey reveals that over half of the participants (59 percent) thought their participation would have at least some influence on the agency’s policy and more than one respondent out of four (27 percent) declared that their participation led to the creation of contacts that they planned to follow up. More concretely, the dialogue generated about 10 to 15 formal comments for realizing the draft on the Public Involvement Policy. Additionally, the introduction of the e-consultation procedure has contributed to ameliorating the image of the agency among the participants at the e-consultation: “43 percent of those surveyed reported feeling more positive about the agency after the Dialogue” (Beierle 2002, 11). A more nuanced perception of the external impact is given by the report on the e-consultations experiments realized within the House of Commons and the Chamber of Lords. The impact of the e-consultation initiatives on the committee responsible for the drafting of the final report was perceived as controversial: “Two of the consultations seem to have had a negligible impact upon the committees which sponsored them; a third was used to shape the agenda for the committee inquiry and a fourth one seems to have had a meaningful impact upon the enquiry for which it was run” (Hansard Society 2006, 17). According to the specialists that followed the experiments, the low level of external impact could be explained by the fact that certain members of the committee were unsure of how to regard the status of evidences stemming from anonymous comments. On the other hand, more positive comments

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suggested that the impact was relevant because of the immediacy of speech and because it provided an interesting appendix to the final report that “a number of people who read the report said that they flicked immediately to the report on the e-consultation” (idem, 14). Finally, similarly to what has been observed for the Environment Protection Agency, the e-consultation organized by the parliament has contributed to ameliorating the image of the parliament, since some people, after participating at the e-consultation, reversed their opinions concerning their initial impression that “the parliament was out of touch.” In sum, the empirical findings confirm that the external impact of the newsgroups and the newspapers’ Web forums is limited while the external impact of the e-consultation and experimental forums is more concrete and direct. This being said, one should avoid considering that all the political newsgroups and forums have low external impact and that all the e-consultation and experimental forums have a strong external impact. This is often the case but is definitely not a rule. There are cases, as we will see for the forum of the political party Radicali Italiani, in which a simple online forum can have a very concrete impact: the level of external impact of an online debate will also depend on the choice of the organizers of the debate to give or not to give an impact to the propositions and opinions expressed in a forum. Finally, it is important to keep in mind that the external impact should not be evaluated in all circumstances on the basis of the same deliberative standards. These should be adapted to the context, visibility, and missions of the Web debates analyzed. 4.3

Concluding Remarks

The comparison of the deliberativeness of ten existing studies, that analyzed a total of 29 online discussion spaces, allows formulating a number of global conclusions concerning the deliberativeness of the online debates. First of all, it contradicts the general and common view, according to which online debates have never been and will never become deliberative forums, for in several cases we noted that the ideals expressed by the theory of deliberation have been approached. Second, it shows that the deliberativeness of the online debates varies according to different contextual factors among which the external impact factor is suggested in order to explain important variations. The role of the external impact factor, which suggests that the higher the impact of the forum is, the higher its deliberativeness should be, has indeed never been contradicted, which means that the deliberativeness of the online debates is not negatively correlated with the intensity of the impact of the online forum.


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On the contrary, we observed the existence of positive correlations for the deliberative criteria of reciprocity, empathy, reflexivity, and external impact, suggesting that the forums that have a strong political impact are more likely to be characterized by respectful and reciprocal exchanges and to encourage its participants to learn from each other. The deliberative influence of the external impact factor could not be verified for the criteria of justification and plurality. For the criterion of justification, the case studies measuring it were too limited to draw any conclusion, and for the criterion of plurality the methods for operationalizing the criteria were too different for allowing any meaningful comparison. For the newsgroups, the criterion of plurality was gauged essentially through content analysis and revealed that it varies greatly according to the topics discussed and ideology that characterize the discussion spaces. For the experimental/e-consultation forum, the level of plurality was assessed essentially through surveys of the sociodemographic profile of its users. The findings suggest they are not representative of the population at large but that, in certain circumstances, they promote the inclusion of citizens who otherwise would not have had a say in the matter. While these initial results encourage pursuit of research on the deliberativeness of the online debates, they also suggest that, in order to reach more precise understanding of the potential impact of certain contextual factors, the methods of analysis should be harmonized and that deliberative criteria that were not measured such as sincerity, inclusiveness, and discursive equality should also be taken into account. In the two following chapters, the external impact factor as well as other contextual factors will be further investigated through an analysis of two original case studies. The first is the influential forum hosted by the Web site of the Italian party Radicali Italiani, and the second are the “electoral blogs” implemented by the French city of Issy-les-Moulineaux to elect several of its district councilors.


Chapter 5

Analysis of the Forum of the Radicali Italiani Founded in 1955, the Radicali Italiani, previously called “Partito Radicale,” is an anticlerical, liberal, and anticommunist party that has played an important role in the Italian political system, even if its electoral weight has always been rather modest1 and it has never obtained a top position in the leadership of the country. Its political importance derived from its early perception of the need for a greater social, religious, political, economic, and sexual freedom and from the use of innovative instruments of political action: the radio, nonviolent action, referendum, and more recently the Internet. The most famous battles conducted by the radicals were the referendum campaigns in 1970s in favor of divorce and abortion. Other important combats or battles delivered were in favor of the legalization of drugs, euthanasia, abolition of the death penalty, antimilitarism, feminism, antinuclearism, freedom of sexuality, and abolishment of the public financing of political parties. More recently, in 2005, the Italian Radicals led the referendum campaign in favor of the freedom of research, particularly on stem cells. This variety of interests and actions shows that the Italian Radicals are a small but complex political reality from which a multiplicity of innovative and often visionary ideas emerged. There is, in other words, an innovative spirit that can also be perceived in the way they have exploited the ICT. It was the first party in the mid-1980s to introduce a Bulletin Board System (BBS) called Agora, which hosted one of the very first virtual communities in Italy and in Europe. It was also the first political party in Italy and probably/possibly in Europe to have a Web site (1995)

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and to have organized binding online elections in 2000 to elect one-third of its executive board. These were repeated a further two times. At the time of the first online elections, the Italian Radicals also implemented an online forum on their Web site that replaced the Agora BBS. This online forum, called the “radical community,” rapidly became one of the most successful forums worldwide with more than 550,000 messages and a great number of people registered for it.2 In the present chapter, we will analyze this forum in order to measure the deliberativeness of the debates and, on the one hand, to evaluate what functions a successful online forum can perform for a political party, and, on the other hand, to point out some of the ingredients that have determined its success. To date, no such research has been conducted in-depth: existing studies on digital political parties are based on Web-content analysis and on the external reasons for using ICT, such as information dissemination and campaigning (Gibson et al. 2003). The internal reasons for using ICT and, more particularly, the role played by the online forum within the parties received far less attention even though, as we observed in Chapter 3, almost one out of two political parties host Web forums, which is much more than the proportion of cities and parliaments that host Web forums. The object of our investigation can, therefore, rightly be considered as largely new and original. In order to conduct our research, we will first present and justify our methodological choices that give clear preference to survey and interview analysis over content analysis. This is followed by the investigation of the level of activity of the forum by analyzing, on the one hand, the evolution of forum registrations and, on the other hand, the rate of active and passive participation in the forum. We will then examine the technical and organizational characteristics of the forum and the sociodemographic profiles of its users. The fourth section is concerned with the largely unexplored question of the functions fulfilled by the forum and whether these are fulfilled successfully. Finally, in the last section, the question of the deliberativeness of the debates is explored by referring to the deliberative criteria that have been implemented in Chapter 2. From a theoretical perspective, the radical forum, which corresponds to an influential public space, is particularly interesting for further analysis of the effect of the external impact factor on the deliberativeness of online debates. 5.1

Methodology

In order to evaluate the functions, activity, and deliberative quality of the online radical forum, we shall refer to the statistics provided by the party

Analysis of the Forum of the Radicali

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on the usage of their Web forum, as well as to interviews and on a broad online survey aiming to obtain feedback from a representative sample of users of the Web forum. The interviews were conducted with 40 people (five women and 35 men) who were questioned on similar matters during the party congress that took place from 29th October, 2004, to 1st November, 2004. The people interviewed were (i) the historical leader of the party, Marco Pannella; (ii) six members of the party’s 18 member executive board (including the party secretary, Daniele Capezzone, as well as the party treasurer, Rita Bernardini); (iii) one member of the “Giunta,” which is a codirective committee composed of ten members; (iv) eight members of the national committee, composed of 60 members; (v) two regional elected party members, from the five regional elected members; and (vi) 22 others, broadly considered as party supporters, even if not all of them possess a party membership card. The online survey was carried out during the first two weeks of May 2005. The questionnaire was designed in order to get feedback from the active forum users, that is, the ones who post messages on the forum, the passive users of the forum, the so-called lurkers, who read but do not write messages, and the people who are aware of the existence of the forum but do not visit it or have stopped visiting it. Several complementary strategies were applied to get a maximum number of users and nonusers informed about the existence of the survey.3 At the end of this process 174 replies were obtained. Among them, only 3 percent said they never used the forum. The other respondents indicated that they used it with the following frequency: 30.3 percent used it “every day,” 32.2 percent used it “at least once a week,” 15.2 percent “monthly,” 9.7 percent “more rarely,” and finally, a significant proportion of users (9.7 percent) declared they “stopped visiting” it. Even if these replies cannot qualify as statistically representative,4 they represent an interesting indicator of the opinions of the forum users. It is, to date, the most extensive survey that has been carried out on a political party’s online community to our knowledge. Additionally, the possible statistical nonrepresentativeness is compensated by the more qualitative data that stemmed from the face-to-face interviews. While the combination of methods that are applied—statistics on usage of Web forums, survey, and interviews—is sufficient for measuring the activity as well as for identifying and evaluating the efficiency of the functions fulfilled by the forum, it offers just a limited appreciation of the level of deliberation within the debates. In order to reach a more encompassing evaluation of the deliberation, this should also be based on content analysis. As we showed in Chapter 2, content analysis

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is necessary for evaluating the reciprocal character of debates and their level of justification and is useful, as a complementary method, for evaluating the reflexivity, empathy, sincerity, plurality, and the external impact of an online forum. While we agreed that it would be desirable to also conduct a content analysis, it would have not been adapted for an evaluation on a large-scale debate, such as the one on the Italian Radicals’ that lasted for more than five years and contained more than 550,000 messages. The content analysis of such a broad online community presents the risk of offering a very partial and meaningless interpretation of the deliberativeness of the debates: it could, at best, contribute to revealing, depending on the sampling method used, the deliberativeness of the forum for a particular period of time, or for a specific function of the forum, but certainly not that of the whole forum. 5.2

General Characteristics of the Forum

When asked to compare the forum to a space of real life, the persons who were interviewed recurrently compared it to a “square” or an “agora,” to a “permanent assembly,” a “bar,” or even a “sports bar.” More originally, it has been assimilated to the “living room at a party” or to “a Venice market,” a market “where people would not only go to buy and sell things, but where they would also talk about the big issues of the world.” These initial comparisons are indicative of the technical and sociological characteristics of the radical forum. As a square or an agora, it is a space that is public. As a sports bar, it is a space that is free and chaotic. Similar to a permanent assembly the forum is, to a certain extent, also a responsible space of discussion. Finally, similar to a market in Venice, the forum is a creative space of discussion. 5.2.1 A Public Space

When the radicals first entered the parliament nobody thought to make the parliamentary sessions public. The radicals did it through pirate broadcasting. We were stealing the session broadcast (each parliamentary group received a broadcast of the ongoing session) and we were broadcasting it on Radio Radicale … We believe that the foundation of the public institution is the publicity. Rita Bernardini, treasurer for the Italian Radicals

The concept of publicity, applied to political and judicial institutions, has always played a fundamental legitimizing role for the Italian Radicals. It, therefore, comes as no surprise that the radical community’s online forum is public as well. According to the topics developed by the threads and the persons who are sending messages, comments can receive more than


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1,000 hits, which means that they can be read more than 1,000 times. The virtual public of the Italian Radicals can obviously be anybody, but, in reality, since it is a community composed essentially of habitués, its users are aware that their contributions are essentially read by party sympathizers as much as by the leadership of the party. For instance, almost all the users are aware that Marco Pannella, the historical leader of the party, reads the forum with an incredible constancy and intensity. In fact, even if he cannot use the computer (he notoriously uses the typewriter Olivetti 22), he has collaborators who print out the new contributions for him daily, or even several times a day, and who bring them to him wherever he is—even at home. The presence of the leadership has a substantial impact on the activity as well as the deliberativeness of the debates that will be analyzed further. The public character of the forum has also a more formal impact that is related to the way the users express themselves. A regular user of the forum explained that “understanding the mechanism (the publicity), each time that he intervenes he writes ‘dear companions.’” He knows, in fact, that he “talks to everybody.” If he wants to refer to just one person he puts his name, but he is aware that at “the end it is always open letter.” Finally, if he wants to have a really private discussion he “asks him his email and writes to him privately.” 5.2.2

A Chaotic Space of Discussion

There is an incredible chaos. But I know that in certain way this chaos tends to find an order and also a disorder. We are at the beginning. M. Pannella, historical leader of Radicali Italiani I would compare it to a square or even to an avenue where you can stop to meet people or simply pass by … there is continuous movement. The square gives more the idea of something circular while the avenue is more like a continuous action … In an avenue you can decide whenever you want to enter a bar and participate to a discussion. Laura Pistone, employee of the Radicali Italiani

As suggested by Marco Pannella, the forum is a chaotic discursive space, at least in appearance. The disordered and confusing aspect of the forum derives from the absence of a preestablished discursive structure. The participants in the forum are totally free to open new threads and/or to participate in existing threads. Visually, each time that a new topic of discussion is opened and/or a comment is inserted in an existing thread, the thread in question jumps to first place on the discussion board and becomes highly visible. This phenomenon is nicely defined as the

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“floating effect.” The metaphor of the avenue depicts this aspect of perpetual movement quite well: every day there is an impressive flood of new and old topics of discussion that is comparable to the movement of citizens debating in an avenue. From a general perspective, one can distinguish essentially two types of threads. There are, on the one hand, the ephemeral threads that last for a few hours or days and that, generally, contain few comments. These are by far the most numerous and correspond normally to discussions that follow and comment on the day-to-day actuality. In an avenue, these could be compared to small groups of people that gather for a short while to discuss particular topics. On the other hand, there are longer threads that can last for weeks, months, or even years. These correspond, in many cases, to subcommunities within the broader community that is the forum. They are generally frequented by users who have similar interests and who have implemented certain bonds of trust and friendship. Pursuing the metaphor of the avenue, these longer threads would correspond to bars, salons, or even little squares frequented by regulars. What structures the discussion and makes it more comprehensible is the users’ ability to filter the content of the messages. Most of the familiar forum users do not read all the comments that are continuously inserted in the forum. They filter the messages that they read and comment on the basis of the topic and the author of the message. This filtering strategy, depending on the person, can be very eclectic. As a user puts it: “Often it is the same people that talk in one thread about American elections and in another about sex.” 5.2.3

An Open but Responsible Space of Discussion

Similar to a bar, a square, or the common room at the party headquarters, the forum is open and inclusive: anybody at any time is free to read, write, or start new discussions. Technically, there is complete openness for the passive use of the forum, since no formality is required to read the contents of the forum. On the other hand, for the active use of the forum, whether for writing new messages and/or opening new threads, the party has opted for a rather bulky system of identification: participants who want to contribute to the forum are requested to register online and to fax in a copy of their identity card. Two reasons were generally given for choosing this peculiar registration procedure. The first is related to the online elections that the party held three times to elect one-third of the members of its executive board. During the last online elections that took place in 2003, several problems of identification were encountered since there were persons who had been voting two or more times under different identities. This was done not so much for influencing the


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electoral outcomes as to prove that the electoral procedures were flawed. Since many active users of the online forum are likely to participate in the online elections, the party’s executive board considered that preidentification of the active users of the forum would strongly decrease the amount of electoral work and the dangers of fraud. The second reason is related to the radical philosophy of the debate. The normative principle applied is that anybody is totally free to say what they want as long as they are accountable for their actions. This procedure makes the interaction more similar to normal face-to-face contact where the identity of the interlocutors is definite. According to the moderator of the forum, a positive consequence of this request is that disruptive behaviors, such as flaming and personal attacks, are limited. 5.2.4

A Free and Creative Space of Discussion

The forum is free in the sense that no censorship is allowed. All the comments, even the most extreme and critical ones, are welcome. Over its four years of existence, the forum has experienced extremely few cases of censorship. These were admitted only when the discursive instrument was made unusable for other users.5 On this matter, Antonio Grippo, the moderator of the forum, said: “Our principal characteristic is that there is no form of censorship. And if in the last years there were people that were chased out from the forum, it was exclusively because they made the forum technically impossible to read. Never for the content.” According to the moderator, censorship should be limited, for its exercise contributes to decreasing the level of participation and the quality of the debates. With regard to the creative character of the forum, Mihai Romanciuc, the precedent webmaster of the Italian radical Web site, observed: “It is striking to note how, with few tools, the forum users have invented everything.” Some users have created opinion polls on different topics such as “who is the best forum user?” and “who should be the new secretary of the party?” Some participants use the forum in a way that is comparable to a blog by piling up, over several years, in the same thread an impressive number of comments that are discussed by other users. Others have used the forum to exercise their artistic skills: they write novels, they send pictures, and they make virtual collages. Finally, the forum witnesses an extremely innovative use of syntax and orthography: “The orthography is becoming vaster,” as a radical user said. We can, for example, mention the wide use of smiley faces, the mixture of colors for writing, the combination of images and text, the imaginative nicknames found for the participants at the forum, the invention of new words, or the original ways of starting and signing their contributions. The former webmaster

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of the Italian Radicals’ Web site is probably right when he says that “the scarcity of tools leads to imaginative ways of thinking what can be done with them.” 5.3

Analysis of Forum Participation

The usage of Web-political forums and, more particularly, of political parties’ Web forums is rarely as important as the one of the Radicali Italiani. In Chapter 3 we observed that out of 163 political parties that were analyzed in the 25 countries of the European Union, 47 percent had an online forum and among them only 13 parties were considered strongly interactive with more than 5,000 comments. With more than half a million messages and 20,000 people registered, the rate of participation within the radical forum is clearly an exception that deserves to be studied in order to identify the ingredients that have contributed to its success and the extent to which these could be applied to other political forums. For analyzing these issues, we will analyze the registration to the forum on a temporal scale and the dynamic of its participation by looking at the type of activity that is privileged (active versus passive participation) and the extent to which the activity of the forum is well distributed among its users. We then will conclude this investigation by suggesting the reasons that, we believe, better explain the existence of such a high and constant rate of participation. 5.3.1

Characteristics of the Participation

In June 2005, 23,612 people were registered on the forum. This means that on average 393 people registered every month. However, this evolution is far from linear. As figure 5.1 clearly shows, there are four periods during which the level of registration was particularly high. The first period that lasted five months (August–December 2000) corresponds to the phase during which the majority of the citizens registered on the forum: almost seven out of ten (68.4 percent) did it during this specific period. This massive interest in the forum is explained by the parallel organization of the first online election (December 8, 2000), which had a major impact on registrations to the online forum insofar as the people who took part at the online elections appeared automatically registered on the forum, even if they never visited it. The second peak of registration that occurred in May 2001 was probably a consequence of the June 2001 national election in Italy. The third wave of registration occurred in June 2002 when the second online elections took place. Finally, the last important increase


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Evolution (in time) of registration at the forum 7000 6000

5898

5000 4000 3000 2000 1000

1142

1202

1375

0 36739 36892 37043 37196 37347 37500 37653 37803 37956 38108 38261 38412

Figure 5.1 Evolution in time of the participation at the Radicali Italiani forum

of the online registration happened in October 2003. It was the period of the Italian Radicals’ second congress and the time of the third online elections. The rate of registration of the second and third online elections was much lower probably because the novelty wore off and also because the last online elections followed less-strict rules that made the vote less attractive. This extremely high level of registration should, however, not be taken at face value for most of the citizens registered with the forum did not make any contribution to the forum. Among the 23,612 people who registered at the forum only 1,314 made at least one contribution, that is just 5.5 percent of the apparent number of forum members . Among the active users, there was, moreover, a phenomenon of discursive concentration according to which a limited number of users were responsible for a majority of comments. The five most active users, who sent between 18,845 and 9,915 messages, were responsible for 15.7 percent of all the messages. The ten most active users, who sent at least 7,647 messages, were responsible for one quarter of all the messages (25.7 percent). The 25 most active users, who sent at least 5,114 messages, were responsible for almost half of all the messages (48.6 percent). The 75 most active users, who sent at least 1,220 messages, were responsible for more than 3 messages out of four (76.3 percent). And the 100 most active users, with a minimum of 909 messages sent, were responsible for 82.9 percent of all messages. On the basis of such findings, one could conclude that the online community of the Italian Radicals is not inclusive. Such an interpretation would, however, be particularly severe, for the radical forum conforms to what happens in most of the online forums and also probably in most contexts of face-to-face public discussions that are generally characterized

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by a minority of speakers and a majority of simple listeners. Moreover, we believe that a permanent assembly of 100 subjects should not be considered as an insignificant score for a small party such as the Radicali Italiani. After all, numbering 100 regular active users is a precious source of political suggestions and information that, as we will see, is very much appreciated by certain members of the leadership. Finally, these findings ignore the passive users of the forum who benefit from the online community just by reading the comments of others. The importance of this category of users is revealed in the survey that indicates that 73.5 percent of the respondents said they read the forum either every day or every week versus 27.9 percent that said they posted messages with the same consistency. 5.3.2

Reasons for High and Constant Participation

Even if the active participation tends to be dominated by a limited amount of users, the radical forum remains, in comparison to other existing forums, a particularly successful discursive space. This success is rooted in a multiplicity of interconnected reasons. The first is its participative culture that is characterized by a discursive philosophy that does not fear but, on the opposite side, praises, as a fundamental democratic principle, the invasion of external opinions, even the ones most critical to the party itself. This participative culture is perceptible in the familiarity and accessibility of most of the party’s leaders, and in the way they organize their public debates and radio broadcasting. The high level of usage of the radical community derives also from the high-tech culture of the party. In the mid-1980s they introduced a BBS called Agora, which was one of the very first virtual communities in Italy and in Europe aiming to facilitate the communication between the members of the Transnational Radical Party. After the disappearance of Agora, which was sold to finance the European election campaign of 1999, several hundreds of people decided to register with the radical forum to pursue/continue their online political activity. According to our survey, one user of the forum out of five (21 percent) was already registered to Agora. The Radicali Italiani were also the first political party in Italy and probably in Europe to have a Web site (1995) and to have organized online binding elections to elect one-third of its executive board. As previously mentioned, the strongly publicized online elections of 2000 contributed to boosting the online registrations since more than two forum users out of three were registered during this period. The success of the forum is also rooted in its endogenous characteristics that are related to its discursive architecture and the personal links


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among its users. Concerning the discursive architecture, the forum is a rare, if not unique, example of virtual public space that is open, not censored, and at the same time accountable by requiring participants to identify online. According to several users, these procedural characteristics correspond to necessary conditions for promoting and maintaining a high rate of participation. The openness and uncensored characteristics of the debates guarantee their democratic character while the identification policy fosters a respectful and responsible type of debate. With regard to the personal links, the forum corresponds to a community where many people already know each other from within and outside the forum. More than half of the people who participated in the survey (63.7 percent) indicated that they know, personally, at least some other forum users.6 The personal links are fundamental for the strengthening of the trust of the forum users and, consequently, maintaining a high level of activity in time. But, probably, one of the most salient reasons for explaining the continuous and high rate of participation is the constant attention that the executive board and, more essentially, the leadership of the party attribute to the forum. Most of the people interviewed underlined that they were motivated to read and to write in the forum because they knew that the radical leaders regularly participated passively and actively in the forum. In other words, they participate because they have the feeling “that they do not talk just to each other in the air, but that they are listened to.” The positive correlation between the presence of the leadership and the general participation in the forum appears clearly in the survey. More than half of respondents (52.8 percent) said they were affected by the leadership’s participation: 32.6 percent said that “they would participate less if the leadership was absent” and more than one fifth (20.7 percent) declared that “they would not visit the forum at all if the leadership was absent.” On the contrary, only 38.6 percent of the respondents said that “they are not at all affected by the presence of the party leadership.” This finding clearly confirms the fact that the external impact factor, in this case the presence of leaders and members of the party who actively use the forum, plays an important role in reinforcing the involvement of the forum users. This suggests that the external impact factor contributes to explaining not only an increased deliberativeness of the debates but also an increased level of participation. 5.4

Profile of Users

A common expression to define the sympathizers of the Italian Radicals is “radical chic,” indicating that their battles in favor of idealistic and

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often disturbing principles, their definite integrity, and their passion for intellectualizing the political actuality, which has tended to attract voters from the sociocultural elite of the country, and to attract as members, well-known, often controversial, public personalities (contentious intellectuals, famous porn stars, transsexuals, etc.). To what extent is the radical chic phenomenon also visible in the forum? The analysis of the sociopolitical profile of the people who participated at the survey is a valuable indicator of the plural character of the forum and, consequently, of its radical chic nature. The radical chic character of the forum users is clearly visible if one looks at the level of education of the forum’s users, for almost half of the respondents (45 percent) did university studies and more than one out of five (22 percent) had postuniversity education. In comparison, the census of the population of 2001 reveals that only 1.3 percent of the Italian population had postuniversity education while only 7 percent of the population had a post-high-school or university diploma. The elitist nature of the forum is also visible through the extremely strong interest its users report to have in political matters: 68 percent of the survey participants felt they had a high political interest and 26 percent said they had a medium interest in politics. Only 5 percent of the participants declared they had little or no interest in politics. The users of the forum differ from the Italian population also from the viewpoints of age, gender, professional activity, and place of residence. Concerning the age, the survey reveals that the users of the forum belong primarily to the three central categories of age: the category 26–35 (24 percent), the category 36–45 (28 percent), and the category 46–55 (20 percent). These correspond to the age categories during which citizens are normally professionally active. The young generation (i.e., 19–25 years old) and the older generation (over 56 years) are also well represented (respectively 13 percent and 12 percent) while the nonadult generation (under 18 years) is almost absent from our sample. Compared to the official estimation carried out by the Italian National Institute of Statistics in 2006, these data reveal that the users of the forum are not representative of the national resident population. This is particularly the case for both extremes of the age categories (under 18 years and over 65 years) for which the users of the forum are clearly underrepresented. From the viewpoint of the gender distribution, three out of every four respondents are male (76 percent) while only 24 percent are female. It is a result that should not come as a surprise since it conforms to two general trends that are widespread: the constant male overrepresentation in political life and the male domination that is regularly observed in online political forums (see Chapter 4). However, it is important to note


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that the fact that 24 percent of the users are women is not insignificant. It is, on average, more than other political forums that lasted a certain time. Moreover, many women in the forum are extremely active, which tends to compensate for the existing gender divide. For instance, the most active user of the forum is a woman that has written 18,875 messages (4.7 percent of total messages), which corresponds to an average of more than ten messages sent every day! Regarding the professional activity, a majority of the participants in the survey are from the private sector (52 percent), whether self-employed (30.5 percent) or employee (21.3 percent). Only 15 percent of our sample works in the public sector. Additionally, it is interesting to note that many respondents are students (15.5 percent) and that only one respondent out of 20 is unemployed. This is less than the global average of unemployment that was observed during this period in Italy, which reveals that in 2005, 7.7 percent of the population was unemployed (ISTAT 2006). As far as the place of residence is concerned, the variety of regions of residence of the people that answered the survey suggests that the forum is a place that allows the political gathering of supporters from all around Italy and even from outside Italy. In fact, 16 regions out of 20 were represented and a certain amount of people (5.5 percent) were living outside Italy.7 The residence of forum participants is, however, not representative of the Italian population at large. There is an absence of survey participants from four regions (Calabria, Molise, Trentino Alto-Adige, and Valle d’Aosta). There is an overrepresentation of forum users from three regions (Lazio, Toscana, and Liguria). There is an underrepresentation of forum users for six regions (Lombardia, Campagna, Veneto, Sicilia, Puglia, and Sardegna). Finally, for seven regions, the two values are rather similar (Piemonte, Emilia Romagna, Marche, Abruzzo, Friuli Venezia Giulia, Umbria, and Basilicata). While the users of the radical forum are not representative of the Italian population at large, they tend to be representative of the members and sympathizers of the party. A vast majority of the respondents (63 percent) declared that they were formally involved in the radical movement. More specifically, 40.8 percent said they were members of one of the radical associations,8 almost one-third (30.5 percent) of the party itself, and an important proportion indicated they were members of the national committee and worked for the party (both 7.5 percent). There were also members of the party’s executive board (3.4 percent) and of the Giunta (1.7 percent), that is the codirective section of the party.9 Finally, among the survey participants, 17.8 percent (31 people) were involved in the radical movement in other ways. A logical consequence of this high rate of involvement in the radical movement is that their voting

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preferences are largely in favor of the Radical party. When asked what party they would vote for if national elections took place the day after, 70 percent of respondents declared they would vote for the Italian Radicals, 18 percent said that they would vote for another party, 9 percent indicated that they did not know for whom they would vote, and 3 percent said they would not vote. The most popular parties aside from the Radicali Italiani are Forza Italia (5 percent), Democratici di Sinistra (5 percent), and Rifondazione communista (3 percent). The rather high representativeness of the radical community is also visible when comparing the places of residence of its members with those of the citizens who possess a membership card of the party, which corresponds to 1,910 people in 2005. The comparison reveals, with some minor exceptions (Lombardia and Toscana), that in the regions where more people have subscribed to the party (and probably where more voters of the party reside), one can expect to find more forum users. 5.5

The Forum and Its Functions

The forum is without any doubt one of the points of reference of the radical reality. The forum is one of our instruments in the same way as our website, our press releases, or radio. Sergio Rovasio, personal assistant to Marco Pannella

When the members of the leadership were interviewed, it was interesting to note that, originally, the functions that the forum was supposed to fulfill were not conceptualized: the forum was just considered as a public space of political discussion. The more specific political functions emerged spontaneously and gradually, as it was used and experienced. We identified several of these functions through the interviews carried out with its users and assessed their importance by asking in the survey what their motives were for using the forum. The survey reveals (see figure 5.2) that the informative function is by far the most important one: three respondents out of four (75.3 percent) said that they used the forum to get information and 38.4 percent to provide information. The discursive function comes just in second position (61.6 percent), which confirms the fact that many forum users tend to be more passive users than active ones. The forum also fulfills functions of political action whether for influencing the political agenda (24 percent), for organizing political actions (15.1 percent), or for contacting the leadership (11.6 percent). Finally, for one respondent out of five (18.1 percent), the forum can also be used to spend a pleasant time with the radical family. This function can be defined as the community function. On the basis of


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Reasons for using the forum (in percent) Contact the leadership

11.6

Organise political actions

15.1

For fun, to have company

18.5

Influence the political agenda

24

Provide information

38.4

Discuss political issues

61.6

Get information

75.3 0

20

40

60

80

Figure 5.2 Reasons for using the Radicali Italiani forum Source: Online survey carried out in May 2005. N: 146.

the interviews that we carried out with the users of the forum, it was possible to elaborate a more qualitative analysis of these different functions as well as others that derive from them, such as political education and e-consultation functions. 5.5.1 Informative Functions

The first and most prominent function is the informative function. Many leaders said that they make an almost professional use of the forums for they provide some specific and updated information on a great variety of topics such as euthanasia, the situation in Latin America, the legalization of drugs, the situation in Italian prisons, nuclear energy, the question of the demographic explosion, the research on stem cells, and the situation in Chechnya. For many members of the leadership, this source of information is extremely useful. As indicated by a member of the leadership: “There is a professional use to be informed about things important to me.” Similarly, the historical leader of the party, Marco Panella, who is a constant reader of the forum, says: “The forum is a mine of information that is continuously growing. I always gave the order to archive it, but not to store it … My only dogma is that nothing must get lost … I always get ideas from there. Today I had to make a decision and I went there.” Daniele Capezzone, the secretary of the party, declares as well that the information contained in the forum is important and relevant for its political activity: “This has happened a thousand times. In other words this is the rule. Everyday there are new ideas that resolve a political question or put it in a new perspective.” He, however, points out that since

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not all information is of high quality, it is sometimes necessary to spend a lot of time to find the useful information. In this sense, he compared the forum users to gold seekers: “It is the same thing as for the gold seeker with a gold pan: there is a lot of sand but at the end of the day you find gold nuggets. So in this sense, there is a lot of very important stuff that comes out at the end of each day. If anything, all the documents and the links. It is, at the end of the day, a unique space of information. I am not aware of many political discussion spaces like this one.” 5.5.2 Political Education Function

Even if not all contributions are of high quality, several users consider that the forum is an instrument of political training. Several users said that their writing skills on political matters greatly improved after participating in the forum. In this sense, a user said that the forum was this person’s “first school of journalism.” The forum is also perceived as a way to learn how to debate about politics. As one user puts it: “Sometimes there are things that are a bit sterile. But sterile up to a certain point, because in any case you can learn the ways of discussing.” Moreover, it is an instrument that, if taken seriously, encourages reflection on some personal opinions: “The participation in the forum is personally enriching for me. You just need to read, if I make mistakes, it obliges me to think.” Some users insist on the diverting character of the forum, which facilitates the process of learning something new: “It is an amusing space in the sense that amusing means another way of learning something.” The logical consequence of the educational function is that the forum also fulfils a function of political recruitment. A number of users have been identified as promising politicians and have been integrated into the party leadership thanks to the forum. An example of recruitment using the new technology is that of Luca Coscioni. Coscioni was a young professor afflicted with an incurable neuromuscular disease who participated in the first online elections of 2001 by promoting, via the forum, a campaign in favor of the freedom of research on stem cells. He has been elected as member of the radical executive board and subsequently as president of the party. Since then, the party has maintained the question of the freedom of research as one of its major political battles. 5.5.3

Function of Contact with the Leadership

The forum is a privileged and practical place to communicate with the leadership of party. As a user said: “It is the most direct way for the members of the party, the sympathizers and also the nonsympathizers to be in


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contact with the leaders of the party.” The emergence of this virtual agora is particularly important for the citizens living outside Rome where the party’s executive board is concentrated. It is also useful for the people who are disabled and the ones who are afraid to communicate directly with certain leaders. The people surveyed were given the opportunity to give some more qualitative impressions on the impact of the leadership. From a positive perspective, the presence of the leadership is considered “gratifying” and “instructive.” Their “willingness to deliberate” shows, according to one user, “a sign of the authenticity of their conviction.” Additionally, “it proves their interest in the people of the radical area.” It is also considered to be a fundamental factor “for creating a link between them and the simple militants and supporters,” which according to another user is “a particularity of the Radicali Italiani that is unlikely to exist in other countries.” From a negative perspective, some people noted a “discrepancy in the way the different leaders participate in the forum.” They noted that their participation “is not constant.” Finally, two users underlined a decrease in the time spent on the forum by the leadership: “The leadership in the past was participating more and it was better.” With regard to the quality of participation itself, one user underlined that “the participation of the leadership is distant and not very open to criticism.” Having said that, it is important to note that when the comments expressed are relevant and widely shared by the community, the leaders to whom the question is raised generally feel compelled to react to them in order to preserve or increase their “reputation capital” among the forum users and, indirectly, the broader radical community. This pressure of the forum is clearly shown in the interviews carried out with two regional elected members who generally avoid the forum because they find it useless, offensive, and confused. I think that the community is not a place for discussing internal political matters … The community is a community of the discontents, the critics and the insolents. It is not a place where once a thread is opened, participants discuss the topic of this thread, but it becomes a territory of stupidities, of generalized hacking. Carmelo Palma, regional councilor of Piedmont Honestly, and with all the due respect, I don’t want to sound pretentious … I am an individualist … I consider the forum of the radicals, where I never enter [unless] I am obliged, a little group of frustrated people. A. Molinari, regional councilor of Lombardy

What is interesting and revealing of the participative constraints of the forum is that despite their critical appraisal of the instrument, the two

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elected officials of the party state that they cannot avoid it completely. In certain circumstances, “when they oblige to” and “have no other choice,” they intervene in the forum. The intervention can be direct as this is the case for the regional councilor of Piedmont: “I intervene in the community exclusively when I am called into question … I intervene to make clear that I don’t want to discuss things in this place or that what has been said is bullshit … I intervened when I had no other choice.” But a defensive intervention can also be indirect, which is indicative of a clear willingness to keep a distance from the forum itself. When I am called into question, I have been informed and I look at the forum … I am informed for example: “there is X who says you are the shame of the radical party.” At that point it has happened that I had to say to one of my colleagues: “since you have been working on this specific area and they have criticized us in that manner, please correspond in the forum, but please don’t be involved in controversy and reply this and that.” Exactly as any manager would do with his staff … If there is a debate on something that is related to our actions, my duty as chief councilor is to explain what we did A. Molinari, regional councilor of Lombardy

This reactivity to personal attack confirms, if anything, the importance that the forum has within the party. In fact, despite the negative opinion some leaders may have of the forum, it is hard to ignore it completely because it is widely read by the radical community. On the basis of these two examples one should, however, not think that all the leaders visit the forum just because they feel obliged to respond to direct criticisms. Most of the leaders we interviewed had a positive opinion of the radical forum; some of them even refer directly to it to get feedback on some specific issues, actions, suggestions, and/or public interventions. This corresponds to what we identify as the e-consultation function. 5.5.4 Militant Function

As revealed by the diversity of regions that are represented in the debates, the forum allows the radical supporters that are dispersed all around the country to have a place where they can meet, interact, and organize their political actions. This function is particularly important for the radicals who have very few territorial sections and limited opportunities to meet all together. It is interesting to note that the forum is used by some members of the party to gain public recognition for work carried out. For instance, during the recent campaign for gathering signatures for a petition against the law that limited the freedom of research on stem cells, many militants


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used the forum to underline how many signatures they had been able to gather. In this case, the forum was used as a way to encourage a sound and lively competition among militants. A user of the forum synthesized this function as follows: “There is a risk of body degeneration. A risk of endogamy. However it is of great help for keeping in contact … The extraordinary aspect is that the forum has existed now for four years and it still fulfills this function, for keeping in contact and more importantly to guarantee a certain circulation of ideas … With the forum you arrive at the congress and you enter into contact much more easily.” 5.5.5 Community Function

The forum is not just about politics, it is also a discussion space where nonpolitical topics are discussed (novels, family, holidays, jokes, cooking recipes, etc.) exactly as this can happen in a public place. This corresponds to the community function of the forum, by which it is suggested that, for many users, the forum is also space to maintain contacts and spend some good time with the members of the radical family. As a user said: “First of all it is a space for not feeling lonely. You interact with persons that would not have anyone to discuss with outside the forum … It is a space of company even through fighting.” Another person confessed that she consulted the forum intensively just before a risky operation. She felt that it helped her a lot because she found a “beautiful humanity” there. The idea of community is also shown by the fact that some people enter into private contact to help each other for matters that are not directly related to politics. The secretary of the party, Daniele Capezzone, aptly suggested that personal exchanges can also have a political outcome: “There are a lot of people that come out of their loneliness and that meet other people in the same situation … they enrich the boat and also themselves a bit. In other words, their loneliness evolves into something else.” 5.5.6

Effectiveness of the Functions

The perceived effectiveness of some of these functions has been evaluated through specific questions that were raised in the online survey. With regard to the informative functions, participants were asked whether they considered that their participation in the forum increased their political knowledge. For the formative function, they were asked whether the forum increased their ability to have political debates. For the militancy function, they were asked whether the forum was useful for their militant work. And finally, in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the

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online forum to contact the leadership, participants were asked whether they considered that the debates in the forum influenced the decisions taken by the party. The function that is the most positively correlated with the usage of the forum is the informative function. For almost 40 percent of people interviewed, participation in the forum had either a high or very high impact on their political knowledge. Furthermore, only 30 percent considered that this impact was low or very low. In second position was the formative function: 28 percent of respondents considered that the forum had a high or very high impact on their ability to debate while 43 percent considered that this impact was low or very low. In third position was the militancy function: for more than one forum user out of four (27.8 percent) the forum has indeed a positive or very positive impact on the militancy work. This rather low score is partly explained by the fact that there has been an important transfer of the virtual militancy work in specific Yahoo lists. These more limited and controllable discussion spaces are considered by several users to be more efficient for organizing their militant work. Finally, slightly less than one quarter of the people surveyed (23.2 percent) considered that the forum content had a high or very high impact on the leadership, which suggests that even if most of the forum users are aware that the party leaders read the forum, most of them do not believe that this will dramatically increase their capacity to influence the party’s political decisions. As indicated by one forum user, one cannot expect of the forum a direct political impact since “more than a space of political initiatives it is a space of suggestions for political initiatives. Things can take form here, and, sometimes, they are even taken into consideration.” According to another user, the primary aim of the forum is not to have a political influence since it is more “a tool to share, to make personal reflections, and to find elements for new ideas and initiatives.” Regarding the impact of their proposals on the leadership, a third person interviewed nicely suggested that “it is like throwing a message in a bottle.” However, the fact that one person out of four considers that the impact on the leadership is high or very high suggests that the chances of a message being taken into consideration are undoubtedly higher for a radical forum user who would post an online message than for a shipwrecked person who would throw a bottle in the ocean. 5.6

Deliberativeness of the Radical Forum

The level of deliberation of the online radical forum has already been partially assessed by measuring the deliberative criteria of inclusion, discursive equality, plurality, reflexivity, and external impact. Concerning


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the criteria of inclusion, we observed that while the forum is accessible to anybody who wants to just read its contents, some unusual procedures of identification are required, whether for writing new messages or for opening new threads. With respect to discursive equality, we observed that all users are given an equal opportunity to express their opinions but, similar to what happens in most political forums, the debates tend to be dominated by a minority of users. Regarding plurality, it has been observed that this tends to be essentially institutional as the forum tends to be used in majority by sympathizers and members of the radical community and is marginally inclusive insofar as a significant proportion of users actively use the forum even if they do not vote for the party or are nonmembers of the party. From the viewpoint of the reflexivity, we have suggested that this should be high since the most effective function of the forum is the informative function. Finally, the external impact of the forum was considered rather important in comparison to other political forums because many leaders read and react to the debates; almost 25 percent of the participants considered that the forum had a high or very high impact on the leaders. In the following section, the above-mentioned criteria (plurality, reflexivity, and external impact) as well as the criterion of empathy will be further analyzed on the basis of specific questions that were raised in the survey. In order to evaluate the plurality, we will see whether the forum is perceived as a context that facilitates the freedom of expression and whether it is considered to encourage the appearance of new voices. With regard to reflexivity, participants were asked whether the online forum has an impact on their political interest, involvement, and opinions. The criterion of empathy is further analyzed by directly asking the participants their opinions on respectfulness of the debates. A last, more complex, issue concerns the external impact factor. We have attempted to introduce a component of intensity in the evaluation of the external impact factor by asking the survey participants to compare the quality of the online community debates with ones that took place just before one of the three online elections. According to the external impact hypothesis, one would expect that citizens would consider that the debates that take place during the electoral campaign were more deliberative than debates that usually take place in the party forum because they are more likely to have a concrete impact. 5.6.1 Plurality

On the basis of the data that have been gathered so far, it is fair to suppose that the forum is a rather homogeneous discussion space that could lead to some polarization of opinions. If one looks at the sociopolitical profile,

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most of the survey respondents are male (76 percent), highly educated (67 percent completed university studies), working in the private sector (52 percent), formally involved in the radical movement (63 percent), and vote for the party (70 percent). Moreover, we have underlined that the debates are dominated by a maximum of 100 regular users. In order to empirically evaluate whether this contextual data could lead to a homogenization and polarization of opinions, survey participants were asked whether they felt that participation in the forum allowed the appearance of alternative voices and/or suggestions. Almost six out of ten respondents (58.5 percent) said that the forum had a high or very high propensity to encourage the appearance of alternative voices while only one respondent out of five (21.4 percent) considered that the propensity to encourage alternative voices was low or very low. This means, in other words, that the sociopolitical similarities and the domination of the forum by a minority of active users do not lead to a homogenization and polarization of opinions. This absence of causality can be explained by a multiplicity of different reasons. The plural character of the forum may derive from the high education level of its users and from its highly informative character. It may also be a consequence of the coexistence of very different political sensibilities whose expression is exacerbated by the great political openness and taste for polemical debates typical of the Italian Radicals. Finally, from a more psychological perspective, the online forum is also a discursive context where some users may feel more comfortable to express new ideas and opinions, not only for the physical distance it allows, but also because it is perceived as a familiar community to express freely its opinions. This is confirmed by our survey that indicates that almost half of respondents (49 percent) felt freer to express their opinions in the forum than in other discursive contexts while 51 percent perceived no difference. Surprisingly, no one considered that they felt less free in the forum than in another discursive context to express their opinions. These findings contribute to confirming the uninhibiting effect generally attributed to computer-mediated communication and suggest that the forum is a discursive location that may encourage the political expression of people who would otherwise remain silent. 5.6.2 Empathy

We assess the criterion of empathy, which we defined as “the extent participants take into account and are sensitive to other participants and positions, not only those immediately present in the forum,” through the perception of the respect within the forum. In order to


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gauge the level of respect, participants were asked: “Based on your personal experience, how high do you consider the level of respect to be within the forum?” We should be aware that according to the way respondents interpret the notion of respect, the meaning could be different. At a very basic level, an interpretation of respect that is likely to be acknowledged by most of the respondents is the absence of personal attacks and rudeness. At a more detailed level, the notion of respect may also refer, for some users, to the personal disposition of the participants such as the reflexive attitudes toward one’s own claims, the willingness to take the demands and counterarguments of others seriously, or the sincerity or absence of manipulation and self-deception. The findings reveal that almost four respondents out of ten (38.3 percent) consider the forum respectful or very respectful while 34.1 percent consider the forum relatively or very disrespectful; finally 27.5 percent perceived it as nor respectful neither disrespectful. These data reveal that the forum does not always stick to a high level of respect. The reading of its content reveals, in fact, that there are comments that are regularly useless or rude, and that there tends to be a minority of provocative users who are very active. What is interesting to note is that that even if the level of respect is not considered to be high by the absolute majority of users, this does not imply that they do not appreciate the functions the forum fulfils and that they will stop using it. It may be that, after all, a small dose of rudeness and provocation can be beneficial for the liveliness and survival of the forum. 5.6.3 Reflexivity

So far, the data gathered indicate that the reflexive impact of the forum is rather high for 39.7 percent of respondents, who felt that their usage of the forum contributed to increasing their political knowledge, while 28 percent considered that it increased their ability to debate about political matters. In this section, this impact will be further analyzed by looking, on the one hand, at the extent to which participation in the forum influences political involvement and interest of its users and, on the other hand, the extent to which it influences their opinions. Concerning the impact on political interest and involvement, the survey reveals the existence of a very limited impact in both cases. Just a minority of the citizens interviewed felt that their participation in the forum had a relevant impact on their political involvement and their political interest (respectively 15.8 percent and 15.1 percent) and a great majority found this impact weak and /or non-existent (respectively

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61.1 percent and 59.1 percent). These findings are logical since most of the survey participants were already heavily politically involved (63 percent declared to be officially involved in one way or another in the radical movement) and almost seven respondents out of ten (68 percent) already had strong interests in politics. In other words, the high levels of political interest and involvement correspond more to preconditions for participating in the forum than to outcomes of participation in the forum. On the contrary, the personal opinions of the users is greatly affected by the participation in the forum: 58 percent of the respondents claimed that they were sometimes influenced by the contents of the forum while no less that 42 percent claimed that they were often influenced by the forum. It is extremely interesting to note that no one answered that the online forum never or just hardly ever influenced their political opinions. 5.6.4

Community Debates versus Electoral Debates

By asking the users to compare the quality of the debates in the radicals’ community forum with those on the forum that were specifically put into place before the online votes, we wanted to further test whether the external impact factor had an impact on the quality of deliberation. Our hypothesis is that the deliberation should be more qualitative within a strong debates context, such as the electoral debates, because citizens should be more motivated to justify their opinions, be more respectful, and continue the debates even in cases of disagreement. Also, the debate should be more plural since the possibility of being elected should encourage people from a variety of horizons to express opinions and to debate with people who have different opinions (Kies & Kriesi 2005). The findings of the survey do not confirm our hypothesis in a clear way: the greatest amount of respondents (35 percent) did not perceive any difference with regards to the level of quality of the debates. However, more than one quarter of them (28 percent) regarded the campaign debates as more constructive. And only a minority (13.5 percent) considered these less constructive. Finally, one in five people (20 percent) had no opinion. Why did “only” 28 percent of the respondents consider the debate in the prevoting forum more constructive? This relatively modest score can probably be explained by the fact that the radical forum has already, to a great extent, created a strong context of deliberation since it is generally largely read—in particular by the leadership that also participates regularly in the forum. Therefore, what the survey participants were asked to compare in reality was an already strong context of interaction with another strong context of interaction. It follows that the perceived impact can only be weaker if the comparison was between a clearly weak


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public space and a strong one. Additionally, it may also be the case that the electoral gain at stake may have led to some disrespectful behavior. 5.7

Concluding Remarks

The Italian Radicals’ forum is, in many respects, exemplary insofar as it is highly frequented, it is characterized by a dynamic and qualitative debate, and it fulfills several functions that are extremely useful for the party members. In other words, it is a forum that is all but futile. For the research, this case study is interesting not only to pursue our investigation of the deliberativeness of the Web forums, but also to analyze the ingredients that contribute to explaining the success of an online political debate and to identify the functions that an online forum can fulfill within a political party. Concerning its particularly high rate of participation, we have underlined that this could happen because the Italian Radicals are characterized by a participative and high-tech culture, by particular discursive rules that combine freedom of speech with responsibility for actions, and more fundamentally, because the party leadership reads and participates regularly on the forum. Regarding the functions fulfilled by the forums, we noted that many of them were not even anticipated by the party members when they began the forum. Not only is the forum a space of political discussion, but it also fulfils an informative function, a formative function, a political recruitment function, a militant function, an e-consultation function, and a community function. With regard to the effectiveness of the functions, the informative function is not only the most appreciated but also the most successful; it is followed by the formative function, the militant function, and the ability to influence the leaders and the political agenda. As for the deliberativeness of the forum, our investigation, based essentially on survey analysis and interviews, allowed us to gather some evidence on some of the deliberative criteria that were identified in the previous chapters. Concerning the plurality of the forum, we noted that the forum tends to favor essentially an institutional type of plurality since the majority of the users are men, highly educated, interested in politics, and supporters of the party. Nevertheless, this apparent sociodemographic homogeneity is counterbalanced by the fact that a relatively large section of the users do not vote for the party, which is unusual for a political party forum, and by the broadly shared perception that the forum encourages the appearance of alternative voices and suggestions. In other words, the sociopolitical similarities do not necessarily generate a

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polarization of opinions. Concerning the discursive equality, we found, as for most political forums, that the debates are dominated by a minority of users. We, however, suggested that this apparent domination should not overshadow the participative and deliberative importance of the forum, since having 100 effective, regular, and active users is after all a rather remarkable number of contributors for a small party such as the Italian Radicals. With regard to the criterion of respect, the mitigated appreciation of its users reflects the existence of a certain level of rudeness in the debates. The absence of censorship, the different opinions characterizing the radical community, and its culture of debate are factors that have probably encouraged such behavior. According to us, if one found that the level of respect was extremely high this should be perceived with suspicion for it could mean that no real debate was taking place. Turning now to the forum’s internal impact, it appears that this is rather limited (but not insignificant) with regard to the political interest and involvement of the users but very significant with regard to the reflexive criterion since all the survey respondents stated that their participation in the forum had “sometimes” or “often” been influenced by the forum’s content. Lastly, we have stressed that the external impact is much higher here than in most existing forums because many leaders regularly read the forum, contribute to it, and use it directly for their political activity, by, for example, initiating e-consultation on some specific topic. From the user side, almost one in four users considers that participation in the forum can influence the leadership, which is a very important finding per se. In synthesis, it is fair to conclude that the leadership presence has contributed not only to increasing and maintaining the level of participation in the forum, but also to increasing the quality of the online debates.

Chapter 6

Online Campaign and Voting in Issy-lesMoulineaux The French town of Issy-les-Moulineaux, situated on the edge of the capital, is an average-sized town characterized by a growing population, a dynamic economic activity, a relatively young population, a high Internetaccess level, and a strong participatory culture. It is said that in Issy “there are more councilors than residents” for, thanks to the driving force of its deputy mayor, André Santini, the town created a large number of places where citizens could express their opinions on the management of town matters. These include traditional committees, such as the economic and social council, the municipal council of seniors, and the municipal youth council. But there are also more individual and innovative ways for people to participate, such as the interactive municipal council or the citizens’ panel. The interactive municipal council, which was created in January 1997, allows residents who have registered with a cable network to follow the municipal council meetings directly on their television and to directly ask questions to the councilors by telephone or by mail. The citizens’ panel corresponds to a representative panel of the Issy’s population formed by an independent organization (Opinion Way) that is regularly consulted via the Internet in order to get their feedback on town projects and initiatives. The participative culture of Issy is also visible through the strong civic orientation of its inhabitants. According to a recent survey, no less than 40 percent of the citizens are members of associations (Citizens’ Panel 2001), more than 80 percent have a positive opinion of the local Internet Web site (Citizens’ Panel, 2002), and a great majority of the population is confident of the Internet’s democratic potential (Citizens’ Panel, 2006).1 In sum, these contextual factors—young and dynamic population, highly

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connected, combined with a participative culture and familiarity for making a political use of the net—suggest that Issy is indeed an ideal city for promoting innovative modes of political participation. In 2005, the city organized, for the second time, the election of 16 district councilors for representing the interests of the inhabitants of its four local districts. Even if much more limited in terms of participation than, for example, the Radicals’ online community, this participative experiment is unique and in many respects avant-gardist as it combines an exclusively Internet-based voting system and a campaign almost wholly led via election blogs where candidates as much as citizens were invited to present and discuss their ideas, opinions, and propositions. In the context of our research, this experience is interesting for a multiplicity of connected reasons. From a descriptive perspective, this experience is relevant for it corresponds to the first empirical analysis to our knowledge of online debates that took place around online elections. From a theoretical perspective, this analysis is useful to further analyze to what extent the fact that an online debate has an impact on the decision-making process influences its deliberativeness as well as its level of participation (external impact factor). Lastly, from a methodological perspective, the analysis of the deliberativeness of Issy debates is useful insofar as it is based essentially on content analysis, while for the Italian Radicals it was based essentially on survey and interviews analysis. The comparative analysis of these different methodological strategies—which was partly imposed by practical choices—will allow to further evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of different methods of analysis for evaluating the deliberativeness of the debates. The investigation of this participative experiment is divided into four parts. The first part introduces and discusses the competences and procedure of elections of the district councilors. The second part analyzes the sociodemographic profiles and motivations of the candidates and noncandidates to participate at the electoral campaign. The third section provides an analysis of the dynamic of the debates within the election blogs by focusing on the activity of both the candidates and noncandidates. Finally, in the last section, the quality of the debates will be assessed on the basis of the deliberative criteria that were developed in Chapter 2. 6.1

District Councils: Functioning and Voting Results

Before the appearance of the district councils in 2002 existed the district committees whose role was essentially to organize social events and make proposals for the town. These local committees, led by numerous volunteers, successfully contributed to developing community spirit, mainly by

Online Campaign and Voting in Issy-les

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promoting social events and helped bring residents closer together by instigating public meetings (two per year and per district, on average). The informal and powerless district committees have been replaced by four district councils, which have been given not only consultative power but also decisional power by allowing them to take part in the participatory budget procedure, which allows the district councils to vote on nearly ten percent of the town’s budget.2 In what follows, we will describe the perception and functioning of the district councils and will analyze the organization and results of the elections of their councilors. 6.1.1

Composition and Perception of the District Councils

Each district council is made up of the following members: (1) the mayor, who is member by right; (2) the chairman, elected by the council; (3) the college of elected members, which includes the deputy mayor responsible for local democracy, the deputy mayor for the districts, and four councilors from the municipal council; (4) the college of residents, made up of four residents elected by an electronic voting system for a period of three years, a representative from the municipal youth council, a representative from the local youth council, a representative of the municipal council of seniors, and a representative of the economic and social council; (5) the college of economic partners, made up of three members from the small and intermediary business club; and (6) one member from the Issy-lesMoulineaux liaison association (ALIM). Even if the district council is a new local institution it is widely appreciated by the resident population. A survey realized just after its creation (Citizens’ Panel, 2003) indicates that there is almost unanimous agreement that the districts councils “will enable local needs to be more taken into account,” “will encourage the development of new ideas to improve daily life in Issy,” “will improve the efficiency of municipal work,” “will encourage dialogue between citizens and councilors,” and that “they will develop contact and interaction between the residents of Issy.” The participatory budget linked to the district councils is also seen under a positive light with 98 percent of Issy Internet users in favor of it. Note, however, that only 59 percent of people questioned think that the district councils could contribute to “bringing residents closer to politics.” 6.1.2 Election of the District Councilors: Functioning and Main Results

In 2005, the inhabitants of Issy were invited for the second time to elect four candidates in each of the city’s four districts for a period of three

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years. Voters were required to be over 18 years old and send a registration form confirming their address of residence. This form, which needed to be sent to the municipal council, could be found in the local newspaper or downloaded from the Internet. Candidates were required to be over 18 years old and had to return the form together with a passport photo and a photocopy of their last local tax bill. The registration period, both for the candidates and the electors, ended on 31 October, 2005. During the two weeks before the ballot, all persons registered to vote received a letter enclosing a scratch card and a front and back sheet with candidate profiles and their reasons for running for office. This information, sent by post, allowed those people who didn’t use the Internet to still be informed about the candidates and the procedures of voting. Voters could vote during a one-week period (from Monday, 5 December, 2005 until Monday, 12 December, 2005), 24 hours a day, from any computer with access to the Internet. Compared to the district council elections in 2002, the 2005 experience was different in numerous and important ways. The organizers of the vote had changed: in 2002, the elections were organized under the “Cybervote” project financed by the European Commission, and in 2005 the elections were carried out by the Election Europe company. The voting period was extended: in 2002, votes could only be cast during one day (it was a Wednesday), whether at the polling station or externally; and in 2005, votes could be cast online from any computer throughout a weeklong period. Also, the administration decided to open the polling stations for one extra day to allow citizens with working schedules to vote on Saturday. However, the main difference compared to the online elections in 2002 was the creation of an online public campaign space that was hosted by the Web site of the city. Each district had a blog in which candidates could introduce themselves and debate with their potential voters.3 The campaign was, to a great extent, carried out via these different blogs, and just marginally in the “real world” via meetings organized in each district to give the candidates the opportunity to meet each other and introduce themselves to the residents. According to the people interviewed, attendance at these public meetings tended to be low both in terms of candidates and in terms of potential voters. The participation at the online elections appeared to be rather disappointing. From an electoral register of 34,600 people, 1,440 registered for these elections and among them only 62 percent actually participated in the elections. This means that, in total, slightly less than 3 percent of all voters in Issy-les-Moulineaux took part in the district elections. This equals 895 voters from the whole town. The level of participation in the election varied from one district to the other: In district one, there were


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273 voters, in district two 338 voters, in district three 133 voters, and in district four 151 voters. Compared to the 2002 elections, participation levels were about the same. At that time, 1,444 people were registered as voters and 860 votes were cast. The major difference was that a significant majority of votes were cast in the polling stations while in 2005 just 6.2 percent voted at the polling stations. This predominance of the polling stations compared with voting at home or work can be explained by the difficulties experienced by voters at the time with voting at home or even at work; these problems are attributed to the Cybervote project responsible for organizing the 2002 online elections. In synthesis, one can conclude from these results that despite the efforts undertaken by the city to promote more efficient and safe methods of online voting and an inclusive and lively campaign through the electoral blogs, the participation at the elections remained relatively low. This reluctance to participate in the elections could derive from a widespread belief that the elected district councilors have, with just four seats per district council, no real impact on the decisions that are taken. It can also be explained by the fact that several inhabitants assimilate this new election as another e-democratic initiative of their mayor, Santini, to attract the public attention toward himself. Finally, it is clear that the fact that the campaign and the voting took place essentially through electronic devices has probably limited the participation of citizens who are not familiar with the new technologies. 6.2 People Involved in the Campaign: Candidates versus Noncandidates The electoral blogs of each district were open to both candidates and noncandidates, whether for reading or for posting messages. In total, 53 candidates stood for election to serve a renewable three-year term and, among them, only 36 participated actively at the online campaign whether by initiating threads or by sending messages in one of the districts’ blog. The noncandidates who took part in the campaign blogs were slightly more numerous at 46. In what follows, we will analyze the sociodemographic profile of the users of the forum by distinguishing the candidates from the noncandidates, and we will propose a qualitative analysis of candidates’ electoral motivations and programs. 6.2.1

Profile of Candidates and Noncandidates

Concerning the sociodemographic profiles of the candidates, the data reveal that there were slightly more male candidates (28) than female

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candidates (25), and the candidates of both sexes were in the majority in two districts each: male candidates were in the majority in districts one and four while female candidates had a slight majority in districts two and three. From the viewpoint of the age, candidates were generally older than the average age of the national population: out of the 29 candidates who mentioned their age, 13 were over 60 (44.8 percent), five between 50 and 59 years (17.8 percent), four between 40 and 49 years (13.8 percent), six between 30 and 39 years (20.7 percent), and solely one candidate between 18 and 29 years old. Another characteristic found among a large number of candidates is their involvement in associations. Nearly half of the candidates (24 out of 53) said they were a member of one or more town associations: the associations most mentioned were the “economic and social council,” to which five candidates declared they belonged, and the “district councils,” of which nine candidates said they had been members during the previous term. This means that out of the sixteen elected people in the district councils, no less than nine stood for reelection. It is interesting to note that no candidate claimed being a member of a political party or even any union, which suggests that district councils are places where political ambitions would be curbed or concealed. If one looks now at the noncandidates—defined as all individuals who actively participated in the political campaign by posting comments in the debates—it is possible to separate them into the categories of men, women, unidentified citizens, and campaign supervisors. As already mentioned, 46 noncandidates took actively part in the campaign. This number rises to 58 if users who participated in debates in several districts are counted each time as different individual participants, such as candidates who participated in a blog in a district that is not theirs or a campaign supervisor who contributed to discussions in several districts. Unlike the trend for the candidatures, men were largely overrepresented compared to women: 23 men against nine women took part in the campaign as noncandidates. Finally, it is important to note that there was a very large proportion of unidentifiable people (23). They took part under a pseudonym or only indicated their surname as identification. The last part of this study will show that this absence of identification was felt and seen by a certain number of users as an obstacle to a good debate dynamic. 6.2.2

Motivations and Electoral Programs of Candidates

Concerning the motivation for participating in the elections, the interviews that we conducted further confirmed that strictly political motivations were limited: the candidates repeatedly declared that they were not motivated


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by political and strategic reasons but rather by the desire to commit themselves to the benefit of the town. The deputy mayor for local democracy who took part in most of the district council meetings emphasized this aspect strongly: “I will always remember that the district councils were non-political. It is a place where you look at the district’s interests and not the interests of each person according to their party color. It doesn’t pose any problem … There are people in opposition but generally it is sufficient to be firm in the debates and politics do not enter into the negotiations.” Along the same lines, the district one council chairman insists on his own political independence and that of his district: “I am not an active party member, I am merely a citizen and above all, as I said in my message, I make this district function in an apolitical way and that is one of the reasons why it works well. In local politics, when there is a hole in the pavement it is not left or right, it is simply there.” However, the absence of political motivation does not mean that the elections were not considered as a serious stake for the candidates. A close reading of the debates reveals that, in fact, many of the candidates fervently wanted to be elected and that the debates were not lacking in vivacity—occasional personal attacks were observed, and the legality of the election and its procedures were repeatedly brought into question. The great difference of quality of the electoral manifestoes reflects the experimental and nonpoliticized nature of these elections. In certain cases, the manifesto was well-thought-out and held concrete proposals, in others it was inconsistent and even dull; in fact, some candidates did not even bother to promote their candidature. Most often, the reasons put forward for standing as candidate was the desire to communicate and bring together the residents’ problems. This was mentioned by at least 19 candidates in a variety of ways. The protection and promotion of the environment and town planning came second with 15 candidates claiming to want to dedicate time to these issues. A significant number of candidates (12) also showed themselves to be concerned with the problems of “integration and community spirit between district residents.” This problem is strongly felt in Issy-les-Moulineaux due to its modernization, which has led to a large population increase and great architectural and social changes. The question of road traffic was also identified by the candidates as one of the major problems to deal with: seven candidates mentioned it in their manifesto. In order to promote and legitimize their candidature, several candidates tended to highlight the beneficial effects that their “personal experience” could have for the district. For example, one candidate who worked for several years in the radio and communications industry insisted that he “hopes to make his organizational and communicative experience available for the benefit of

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the community.” In last place, a motivation cited by several candidates was, as the authors termed it, a sense of “duty.” This refers to the reasons put forward by most exiting district councilors who wanted to get their mandates renewed. It is interesting to note that the latter tended not to provide additional justifications for their candidatures, as if the fact of being in charge provided them with sufficient motive to stand as candidates and be reelected. 6.3

Dynamic of the Campaign

During its three months of existence, the blog activity underwent three major phases. The first phase, which can be defined as “information and education phase,” corresponds to the period during which only the campaign supervisors could initiate a discussion and all interested citizens could interact by posting comments. The main aim of this debate period, lasting from mid-September to the start of November 2005, was to inform citizens about the district elections and enable them to discuss the functions and objectives of the district councils. During this first phase, the campaign supervisor opened a thread in each campaign blog within which was reported a presentation of the district council chairman of the work realized by the district council in the last three years. From 7th November 2005, when the list of candidates was officially posted online, the actual “online political campaign phase” began. It is only from this date on that the candidates were introduced online and could initiate new threads in their district blog. Finally, from 2 December, 2005, at 1800 hours, three days before the start of the elections, the blogs were deactivated. No further debate could take place in the blogs in order to avoid influencing the voters just before the voting period. However, even though the campaign blog was no longer active, it was still possible to consult it. These different phases experienced differences in both active and passive visitor numbers. 6.3.1

Temporal Activity in Election Blogs

A total of 381 postings—151 threads and 230 comments—were sent in the district blogs during the campaign. The threads that correspond to the opening of a new discussion could be initiated only by the officials supervising the campaign and by the candidates in their own district electoral blog. In contrast, anyone could post comments within these threads. Figure 6.1, which portrays the different forms of participation throughout the campaign, allows thorough identification of the different


151

120 107 100

93 87

80 60 41

40 20 0

12

31

14 14

4 1 0 0 [15/09–30/09] [1/10–15/10] [16/10–31/10] [1/11–15/11] [16/11–30/11] Comments

Total threads

18 14 9 [1/12–2/12]

Candidate threads

Figure 6.1 Dynamic of debates in electoral blog of Issy-les-Moulineaux

phases of the campaign. The first phase of information and education, from mid-September to the start of November, is characterized by a limited number of threads and comments. The debates in the four districts concentrated around the threads initiated toward mid-September 2005 by the campaign supervisors who were publishing information elaborated by each exiting district president, discussing the role, functions, and the main results obtained in each council during the three years of their term. From October on until late in the campaign, messages were frequently stoking these initial threads. As a consequence of their longevity and their success, these initial discussions were the ones that received by far the most comments in the four districts. From the beginning of November on, when the political campaign opened, to the beginning of December, when the blog was closed, a double phenomenon could be observed. First, the number of threads grew sharply in each district, although not in the same way. During the first half of November, a majority of the threads originated from the campaign supervisors: these latter were responsible for 52 threads while candidates were responsible for only 41 threads. During the second half of November, the candidates were the only ones to initiate threads, and from that moment on, the number of threads tended to decrease. It went down from 41 threads in the first half of November to 31 threads in the second half of November, to eventually come to 14 threads posted in the first two days of December. The large number of threads posted those last two days is explained by the fact that a large number of candidates wanted to send a final promotional message. The second notable fact is that of an increase

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in the number of comments posted. It went from 14 comments at the end of October to 87 comments at the start of November, to reach a peak of 107 comments at the end of November and nine comments in the first two days of December. The candidates were responsible for over half of the total number of the messages sent (50.7 percent) while the noncandidates were responsible for just 43.8 percent of the messages sent. This means that among the total of 230 messages that were sent in the four districts’ blogs, 100 were by noncandidates, 117 by candidates, and 13 by political campaign supervisors. These data confirm the impression among several people interviewed and comments in the electoral blogs, that the campaign resembled, above all, a debate between candidates. Concerning the threads, it is striking to note that just a limited number of discussions were initiated by the candidates themselves. Of the 151 threads from all four districts together, only 77 were initiated by the candidates while the rest of the threads were initiated by the campaign supervisors. On the basis of these figures, we could easily infer that the campaign supervisors had intruded on the debates. However, this is not the case, as the threads initiated by the campaign supervisors consisted, for the most part, of transcribing presentations that had been transcribed by the candidates as well as transcribing a presentation for each district by the respective district chairmen. The remainder of the threads consisted of informative or practical guides to the district councils or the online elections. Finally, on one or two rare occasions, those supervising the online elections were required to intervene in order to correct errors that they themselves had noticed or had been brought to their attention. 6.3.2

Usage of the Campaign Blogs

The number of hits that the campaign blogs received is correlated with the level of activity within the blogs. A moderate frequency was recorded for the month of September, when the blogs were opened (average of 1,910 hits per day). A significantly higher frequency occurred in the month of October, which coincided with the hits received by the first debates held via threads on the subject of the role and function of district committees and of the participatory budget (average of 3,397 hits per day). The most significant level of usage was recorded in November, when the campaign was in full swing (average of 6,303 hits per day). Finally, from December 2005, the level decreased dramatically. One of the major limitations in analyzing the usage of the site according to the number of hits is that it provides little information about the number of individual users who actually visit the campaign blog. There are other methods, although less accurate, that give a more concrete indication of


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the frequency of usage of the campaign blogs. One of these is based on the computer’s identification address (IP address). Given that each computer uses a unique identification address when connecting to the Internet, it is possible to measure the number of different addresses that connect to a particular site within a given period of time. According to this method, a total of 1,183 different IP addresses were recorded in October, 1,454 for November, 1,262 for December, and 1,182 for January. To put it another way, if we suppose that each IP address corresponds to a single, different individual, this would mean that the number of people who had visited the blog Web site is similar to the number of people who had registered to vote (1,440 people). A finding that could signify that many of the potential voters had been attracted by the virtual campaign. One final aspect that can be analyzed from the blog-usage statistics is the rate of usage according to the time of the day. The campaign blogusage statistics for the whole campaign period reveal four specific time brackets. The first bracket, from 3pm to 7pm, represents the heaviest period of usage, with 39.9 percent of the total participation. The second bracket, from 10am to 2pm, yielded 28.4 percent of the total usage, while a third, from 8pm to 12am gave rise to 18.7 percent. Finally, the usage of the Web site was lowest during the night and into the early hours of the morning. The combined usage between 1am and 9am in the morning corresponds to 13 percent of the total. 6.4

Deliberativeness of the Campaign Debates The blog is a new plague … I can understand how someone with similar ambitions to Juppé could maintain a blog through which we are given an update of their sentiments. But a lambda citizen … it’s a little pretentious to write on your blog that I wake up with such and such a subject in my head and I go to bed with another subject on my mind. Interview with a candidate It could be said that the blogs allow for some sort of release. In our district, the debate seemed to me to be well thought out and relatively realistic in terms of wishes expressed and possibilities for action. Interview with a candidate I don’t think the blog particularly favors serious reflection, as some will type at great speed and in two lines. The author of the post will of course put some degree of thought into it, but the person who responds will just comment or quarrel with people. It is not necessarily an environment conducive to a high standard of democratic debate. Interview with an official supervisor

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As suggested by these different extracts of interviews, the blogs were differently appreciated by its users and observers. According to a candidate, the blog is just a “pretentious” and “fashionable” exercise that is, however, not useful for the local realities. A more positive appreciation is provided by the second candidate, who suggests that the blog was informative, constructive, and realistic. Finally, a campaign supervisor considers that the blog is not “an environment conductive to a high standard of democratic debate” since its great speed does not favor serious and constructive reflection. In this section, we will provide a more rigorous evaluation of the quality of the debates by measuring their deliberativeness. The deliberative criteria that will be assessed are the following: inclusion, discursive equality, plurality, reciprocity, reflexivity, justification, empathy, and external impact. As with most of the existing empirical investigation, we did not take into account the criterion of sincerity for we did not find any convincing way for assessing it in the specific context analyzed. However, since the electoral positions are of limited importance and do not implicate great political interests, we can suppose that the level of sincerity should be relatively high. The deliberative criteria have been operationalized on the basis of the propositions that were elaborated in Chapter 2. The criterion of inclusion is evaluated by analyzing the data on the participation of the different categories of participants and the interviews that were realized with the candidates and the supervisors of the campaign. The criterion of discursive equality is gauged by comparing the activity of the different categories of participants. The criterion of plurality is evaluated on the basis of the sociodemographic data of the users and their activity in the forum. The reciprocal and reflexive deliberative criteria are measured through the dimensions of dialogue and reciprocity that are inspired by Jensen (2003): the dimension of dialogue compares the proportion of messages that initiate a debate (threads) to the proportion of replies within these threads, while the dimension of reciprocity aims at evaluating to what extent and in which way a posting takes into account and relates to other posts and arguments. The extent to which a posting is taken into consideration reveals the reciprocal character of the posting, and the way a precedent post is taken into account reveals the reflexive character of the post. The deliberative criterion of justification is evaluated exclusively for the propositional messages by observing if and to what extent the propositions are justified. The criterion of empathy is measured by observing the proportion of messages that show disrespect and by referring to the length of the threads. Finally, the external impact is evaluated by measuring the proportion of messages that contain concrete propositions.


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6.4.1 Inclusion

The criterion of inclusion implies that all those individuals interested in the discussions must be granted the possibility of participating. This was hardly the case for the Issy experiment since the electoral campaign took place almost exclusively online, which means that those without an Internet connection or with little experience of the Internet remained automatically excluded from the debates. Apart from the district meetings that took place at the very beginning of the campaign, and that were poorly attended by both by the candidates and by the electors, no alternatives were offered at any other meeting for the nonconnected citizens to participate in the campaign. This was a preoccupation that was expressed several times by the candidates themselves in the blogs when they noticed that very few citizens were participating in the debates. The only step taken toward inclusion was very limited and concerned the candidates; it was an hour-long training course offered to candidates for learning how to use the campaign blog. However, this initiative, which was apparently well followed,4 does not seem to have been efficient enough to promote a broad participation since, among all the candidates, only one out of two (54.7 percent) participated in the online campaign. Or rather, this translates to 29 candidates out of 53 who participated actively in the electoral debates. 6.4.2 Discursive Equality

The criterion of discursive equality implies that each individual must have equal opportunity to express their own opinions. One of the main objectives of this criterion is to allow for the expression of a plurality of points of view that reflect the different concerns on a specific issue. From an organizational perspective, it can be argued that the discursive equality was not promoted insofar as the threads could only be initiated by candidates and campaign supervisors. Nevertheless, such a restrictive choice can be considered as fair in the context of the electoral experiment, insofar as the objective was to focus the debates around the candidates’ proposals. Concerning the usage of the electoral blogs, the data suggest that the equality of the debates was largely not reached. The equality was absent among the candidates not only because just one out of two actively participated in the online campaign, but also because some were clearly more active than others. The most active candidate of each district was responsible for one thread out of three (33.8 percent) and the three most active candidates of each district were responsible of more than 6 threads out of 10 (63.6 percent). From the viewpoint of the gender distribution, the male candidates were responsible for 68.8 percent of the

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total number of threads, while the female candidates were responsible for 31.2 percent of the threads. The equality of the debates was also not reached between the candidates and noncandidates. The former were responsible for over half of the messages sent within the threads (50.7 percent) while the latter were responsible for 43.7 percent of the messages. These data are all the more significant since the active candidates who wrote messages were only 21 while the active noncandidates were 55. Finally, there is also a nonequality of participation from the viewpoint of the gender distribution. With regard to the messages, male participants were responsible for the absolute majority of comments (58.1 percent), while female participants were only responsible for one fifth (20.5 percent). In concrete terms, this translates to 133 out of 230 comments that can be attributed to males and 47 to females. The two other categories, namely the unidentified participants and the campaign supervisors, were responsible for 15.7 percent and 5.7 percent of comments, respectively, which correspond to 45 and 38 messages. 6.4.3 Plurality

The overrepresentation of certain categories of the population among the candidates and the noncandidates combined with the low level of active participation in the campaign blogs suggests that different opinions stemming from the population of Issy may not be represented in the electoral debates. In other words, it could well be that the online campaign may be more representative of the senior, male inhabitants of city than the entirety of its inhabitants. This conclusion should, however, be nuanced. From the viewpoint of the participation, there were, in some electoral blogs, several young, female candidates who were particularly active and efficient at defending their opinions. Additionally, if one looks at the content of the debates and the program of the candidates, it appears clearly that many propositions were more encompassing that the simple direct interest of the competing candidates. In other words, a certain level of plurality was reached in the forum despite its nonrepresentative character, for several participants have attempted to discuss a wide range of issues that concerned all the inhabitants of Issy. 6.4.4

Reciprocity and Reflexivity of the Debates

The criterion of reciprocity evaluates the extent to which a conversation corresponds to a real discussion. In other words, it is observed whether or not the individuals interact with one another, or whether, on the contrary, people just talk without listening to each other.


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A first level of reciprocity is measured by observing the proportion of threads that received at least one comment and, on the other hand, the number of comments that were on average, posted in the active threads. According to the data that were gathered, only 40.4 percent of threads received at least one comment. More specifically, only 61 threads out of 151 received at least one comment. Moreover, among the threads that were commented upon, just a limited number lead to a long debate. More than half of the active threads (54 percent) received one or two comments. A significantly fewer amount of the active threads received three or four comments (23 percent) and even fewer received more than five comments (19.7 percent). This means, in other words, that a constructive debate could have taken place only in a limited amount of threads. However, this analysis alone is not sufficient to measure the reciprocity: actually, the posting of a comment on a discussion does not necessarily constitute a reciprocal debate. In order to reach a more precise understanding of the presence of reciprocity and also of reflexivity of the debates, one needs to observe to what extent and in which way a precedent post takes into account and relates to other posts and arguments. To do that, we adopt the measurement of Jensen (2003), who distinguishes three types of reciprocity that are indicative of the reflexive nature of the messages: (1) Persuasion: the poster seems to be persuaded by another poster’s opinions or arguments; (2) Progress: another post is taken into account and the debater tries to bring the debate forward by reflecting and bringing in new opinions, arguments, and points; and (3) Radicalization: another post is taken into account in a negative manner. The debater radicalizes their points and/or the disagreement is augmented. This more elaborated measure of reciprocity is applied to the campaign blogs of the districts one and four. Table 6.1 indicates that about half of the posts in district one are reciprocal—much less so in district four. This means that, in many cases, we are in front of what Dumoulin called “interactive monologues,” where one states his opinions, or promotional campaign messages within a thread without considering the other messages. When looking at the type of reciprocity, it appears that the number of messages that reflect instances of communicative progression and reflection is very limited. Just 17 messages in district one and five messages in district four can be labeled as progress, which means that a precedent post is considered in a positive and constructive way. As far as the content of the progressive messages is concerned, it should be noted that the latter are not necessarily related to some concrete projects of the electoral program. Many of them are related to the organization of the campaign and to the functioning of the district

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Table 6.1

Level of reciprocity in electoral blogs of districts one and four Degree of reciprocity District 1

Posting containing reciprocity* Type of reciprocity Persuasion Progress Radicalization

District 4

Frequency

%

Frequency

%

42

51.2

11

28.2

15 17 10

35.7 40.5 23.8

2 5 4

18.2 45.5 36.4

* The % is calculated as total number of reciprocal postings divided by total number of replies (not threads)

council. The rest of the messages that were identified as reciprocal were either signifying persuasion (district one: 15 messages; district four: three messages) or radicalization (district one: ten messages; district four: four messages). The persuasion indicates the existence of reflexivity that, however, is “sterile.” There is reflexivity because the content of the debate has led to an agreement; this reflexivity is, however, sterile insofar as it does not lead to a progression of the debates. Radicalization indicates the presence of negative or provocative comments about another posting, which often generate quarrels. It is interesting to note that the radicalization is important for the electoral blogs that were analyzed. When Jensen compared the research findings that he realized on the experimental forum Nordpol, he found that just 5.1 percent of the reciprocal messages corresponded to radicalization while 85.6 percent were progress and 9.3 percent were persuasion (Jensen 2003a). This difference may be due to the fact that the case of Issy corresponds to an electoral debate while the Danish case of Jensen (Nordpol) is a forum that is specifically designed to foster a constructive debate between citizens and professional politicians. 6.4.5 Empathy

The level of empathy of the debates was evaluated in terms of whether or not they took place in a respectful context. Therefore, each time that a message was rough, unfriendly, or based on personal attack, it was labeled as nonrespectful. The level of respect that has been assessed for districts one and four is satisfactory. For district one, 85.5 percent of the messages were respectful and for the district four, this was the case with 90.2 percent of the messages.


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The reading of the debates confirms that these were, with a few exceptions, respectful. There were a few occasions where some comments were impolite or abrupt; however, it would have been surprising had this not been the case in a political-electoral debate. The cases of disrespect tend to derive from two factors: the tone of superiority adopted by some candidates standing for reelection and the fact that some participants— who were hiding their identity under nicknames—were sometimes slightly provocative. One interviewed candidate suggested that nonidentification encouraged uncivil behavior, which in turn discouraged those citizens who wanted to participate in a civilized debate: There was a fundamental problem that arose in district one. A poster using the pseudonym of Milou launched a personal attack on me. I declared that a pseudonym was not acceptable. The poster retorted that the rules of the blog allow for the use of a pseudonym. I said very well, if the rules of the blog are not in tune with the rules of local democracy, then I shall no longer participate. Milou continued the personal attacks and went on to attack another vice-chairman. The tone further deteriorated. Milou had therefore sullied a large part of the blog. I think that in the future, one should only be able to post messages when the moderator of the forum is present and when the identity of the individual is certain, as in public meetings people introduce themselves. Interview with a candidate

It should be underlined that the anonymity is not necessarily negative. In this specific case, the user who was not identified was the only one to raise some issues that, while provocative, helped to underline some problems that many citizens did not have the possibility of voicing or the courage to raise. In other words, the anonymity has allowed for the expression of useful opinions that probably would not have been proffered had the posters’ identity been asked for. 6.4.6 External Impact

The external impact of a discussion space can be measured in a multiplicity of ways that range from a focus on the characteristics of the participants to the concrete outcomes of the debates. With regard to the campaign forum, the fulfillment of the criterion is gauged by observing the number of propositions that are made in the different electoral blogs. These propositions are not required to relate to an electoral project but are required to be concrete. The concrete character of the propositions means that general intentions about what should be done that are not accompanied by concrete measures for their realization are not considered

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as proposition. For example, a candidate said “having free time and the willingness to create a bridge between the aspirations of the inhabitants and the obligations of the municipality, I would like to increase my investment in the life of the city.” In this case, the willingness to increase the communication between two instances is just a vague intention; in order for it to be coded as a proposition, the candidate should have indicated some concrete proposals for increasing the communication between both instances. Since the forum is a campaign forum, one can expect that numerous and various propositions should be expressed and justified. Table 6.2 reveals, however, that the number of propositions that were expressed in the two blogs is in reality rather low. In district one, less than one message out of five contained a proposition (18.2 percent) while in district four, this was the case of solely 13.7 percent of the messages. Very few propositions were elaborated even among candidates, who generally expressed intentions but did not offer any concrete solutions for realizing these intentions. When propositions were expressed, they were generally justified, but rarely in an elaborated way. It almost never referred to external information—such as studies, statistics, or press articles—that would have contributed to enlightening the debates. The limited number of propositions and the light character of their justifications is probably a consequence of the absence of political professionalism of the candidates who have not elaborated their electoral program in advance. It also suggests that these elected positions are perceived as an associative work and not so much as a political work. Interestingly, the content of propositions spread out over a wide variety of topics. There were propositions aiming at ameliorating the Table 6.2 Level of justification and external impact in electoral blogs of districts one and four (Counter-) propositions and their justification District 1

Postings containing (counter-)propostions* Nbr of propositions with justification**

District 4

Frequency

%

Frequency

%

24

18.2

7

13.7

22

83.3

6

85.7

* The % is calculated as the total number of propositional messages divided by the total number of messages (threads, replies and monologues) ** The % is calculated as the total number of propositional messages with justification divided by the total number of propositional messages


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campaign: among other things, it has been suggested that the candidature of citizens who have been elected and/or hold other local responsibilities should not be admitted. It has also been proposed that the candidates should become more visible outside the campaign blog by organizing more meetings and by publishing their pictures in the local newspapers. Some propositions aimed at organizing cultural and sportive events, particularly for the younger and older generations. One proposition, for example, was to organize a competition for the best young author of a comic strip from the city. Another proposition called “pepper and salt” aimed at organizing cultural events (conferences, theatre, etc.) around the question of old age. Other propositions aimed at allowing a better circulation in the city and to foster a better quality of life by, for example, the flowering of the neighborhoods or fostering a convivial rehabilitation of old sites. Finally, there were some propositions aiming to promote a permanent communication between the citizens and the elected district councilors; this by increasing the meetings and by using the ICTs. Concerning the ICTs, it has been proposed to maintain a blog for each district even after the election and to organize e-consultations on the different issues that are debated. 6.5

Concluding Remarks

When evaluating a new experiment of democracy, it is often easy to draw too swift a conclusion that is flawed. The experiment of the Issy-lesMoulineaux district council elections of 2005, which combined an exclusively online vote, an almost exclusively online campaign, and the participatory budget, is no exception to the rule. It has been highlighted here that the exclusive Internet vote, tested for the second time for the 2005 elections, was characterized by a low rate of participation. With 1,440 registering and 895 voting, only three percent of Issy-lesMoulineaux’s electorate got involved in the experiment, which is not an improvement from the district council elections of 2002. This investigation suggests that the low level of participation can be partly explained by a lack of information regarding the elections as well as the awkward voter-registration process. It can also be put down to the fact that a number of inhabitants (particularly the older generation) are not comfortable with the medium. Finally, it has also been revealed that the security and confidentiality of the vote also provided cause for concern for many citizens of Issy-les-Moulineaux. However, some positives can also be drawn from the results. It is both significant and encouraging that 3 percent of the population takes enough of an active interest in the well-being of the city to participate in experimental elections concerning

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the appointment of candidates who will have limited powers with regard to policy. This is, in any case, democratic progress in comparison to most of the cities where the municipal council has the discretional power to appoint the district councilors. The campaign blogs, trialed for the first time for the 2005 elections, can also be said to have been characterized by a low and unbalanced level of participation. In terms of initiated discussions (threads), only 29 candidates out of 53 began a discussion, and among these candidates, many more males were active than females. In terms of those who participated in the forums, only 46 noncandidates actively participated in debates and of those there were almost twice as many males as females. Males were also overrepresented in terms of the number of comments posted: 58.1 percent of comments were posted by males as opposed to only 20.5 percent by females. The forum was also disappointing from the viewpoint of the discursive equality and the reciprocal characters of the debates. Concerning the discursive equality, we observed that the most active candidate from each district was responsible for one out of every three messages posted, and about the reciprocity, we noted that less than one thread out of two received at least one comment and that very few threads hosted a lively debate. Finally, instances of reflexivity were rarely visible in the debates and did not, in the majority of cases, lead to a progression of the debates. Nevertheless, there are certainly some positives that can also be taken from the blog experiment. The candidates made some concrete proposals on important issues in each district. These are not particularly numerous, but at the same time, their number should not be underestimated. The debates were generally respectful and often constructive. Generally speaking, it could be suggested that a close reading of the debates would provide a relatively accurate overview of the candidates. It is probable that, thanks to the blogs, the voters were given the opportunity to gain a more complete picture of their candidates than they did in the elections of 2002. In sum, this online voting and campaign experiment is generally positive but would need to be more inclusive, by allowing those candidates and voters who do not have or do not want to have an Internet connection to be able to participate fully in the elections. For this reason, the campaign should also take a more traditional form (such as public meetings), and voters should be able to vote by traditional methods (for example by postal standard mail), should they choose to.

Conclusion The general purpose of this book was to evaluate whether the increasing success of the online political debates, which we defined as the virtualization of political debates, can favor the emergence of a more deliberative democratic process or, on the opposite side, whether this phenomenon has no impact or a negative impact on the deliberativeness of our democracies. The present work has attempted to evaluate the deliberative potential of the online political debates through three interconnected research questions. The first is related to the diffusion of the online debates by observing how widespread the phenomenon is and who the users of the online debates are; the second looks at the offer of the online debates, by analyzing which are the political actors (civil society, media, institutional actors) that are more inclined to host the online political debates; and the third concerns the deliberativeness of the online debates by defining the methods that should be applied for measuring this deliberativeness and by identifying the factors that favor the participative success and deliberativeness of the debates. With regard to the diffusion of the online debates, the survey data we analyzed indicate that the general and political use of online forums is important and likely to become increasingly so. This is suggested by the growing rate of Internet penetration, by the fact that the online forums are already widely used, particularly in electoral periods and among the young generation, and by the increased user-friendliness of the discursive platforms that is further reinforced through their integration into other e-participation tools such as the online voting, the voting advice systems, and the e-consultations. Concerning the offer side and the related question of the political actors that are most likely to host online political debates, we have limited our investigation to three types of actors: the parliaments, the local authorities, and the political parties. The analysis reveals that while the population and the members of the political actors analyzed (MPs, local representatives, members of political parties) generally praise the participative and deliberative opportunities of online debates, this does not imply

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that their own institutions have implemented such possibilities on their Web sites. Indeed, most of the actors we analyzed provided simple interactive features (such as e-mail) but important differences could be observed concerning the provision of interactive features such as the online forums and consultations. These were almost absent for the parliaments and, when the latter existed, were poorly used or abandoned. The cities—particularly the big ones and, in Europe, the Scandinavian ones—were slightly more likely to grant possibilities of discursive interaction but not of consultation. Finally, the political parties were by far more likely to host online forums. This was the case of almost one out of two EU parties (47%). We have suggested that the greater discursive offer of the political parties derives from their competitive nature, their more flexible structure, and the potential of the partisan online forums to fulfill important functions, both for their leaders and for their sympathizers. We saw, for example, that for the Radicali Italiani the very successful forum was used as a source of information, as a space to organize the political actions, and as a direct link to the leadership, as well as a space to share good times with the radical community. We deplored the parliamentary Web sites that did not offer more opportunities for consultations. This is, according to us, a missed opportunity, not only because the parliaments could, through such reforms, benefit from a more modern image that would better suit the wishes of the citizens, but also because a parliamentary Web site is a privileged place to promote a deliberative democratic process. It is, in other words, a context that could favor the emergence of debates among the legislators and the citizens that would be at the same time highly frequented, deliberative, and influential. As far as the deliberativeness of the online debates is concerned, a first major issue was obviously the question of the operationalization of the deliberative criteria (inclusion, discursive equality, reciprocity, justification, reflexivity, empathy, sincerity, plurality, and external impact). By making an extensive and critical review of the existing attempts to measure the online debates, we came to the conclusion that, ideally, one should attempt to assess all the deliberative criteria and if this is not possible one should clearly specify the deliberative criteria that are not measured. We also suggest that the deliberative criteria should be measured by combining different methods of investigation. The content analysis and the analysis of the dynamic of the debates should be used to have a grip on the visible expression of deliberation while the survey and the interviews should be applied in order to evaluate the internal, less visible, presence of deliberation. The methods used and the evaluative standards that are applied to each deliberative criterion should be defined on the basis of the nature and characteristics of the scrutinized

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case studies. For example, the external impact criterion should not be evaluated the same way for a newsgroup and/or for an e-consultation forum. Similarly, it would be a mistake to require the same level of plurality for a forum hosted by a political party than, for example, one hosted by a governmental institution. Coming now to the general evaluation of the deliberativeness of the online debates, the results of numerous case studies analyzed clearly refute the common statement that the online debates cannot, by definition, be deliberative discursive contexts. Our investigation showed that, generally, the opinions expressed in the forum are justified (even if just superficially), that the debates do generally not lead to a polarization of opinions even if the participants share similar interests and have similar political ideologies, that the debates are generally not invaded by disrespectful behaviors, that the online debates can contribute to enlightening the opinion of its active and passive users, and that some of them have concrete political outcomes. In sum, the online debates are just another discursive context that, like other discursive contexts (TV, radio, written debates or face-to-face debates), can in certain circumstances lead to deliberative debates. The real question then is not so much whether the online debates are deliberative in general but in which circumstances do the online debates foster deliberative forms of debates. The comparative analysis has allowed identification of several factors that may bear upon the success of the online debates as well as their level of deliberation. These are the sociodemographic characteristics of the users of the forum, the participative culture of the institutions hosting the debates, the discursive architecture of the online debates, particularly their identification and moderation policy, the nature of the topics discussed, and the external impact of the online debates. We argued that the potential impact of the online forum (external impact hypothesis) is among the most prominent factors explaining divergence observed in the deliberativeness of the online debates. According to this hypothesis, if ordinary citizens believe that their writings might have an impact on the decision-making process, they will be more motivated to adopt a deliberative attitude. By comparing case studies that have a limited external impact (mostly newsgroups and simple Web forums) with cases that have a stronger external impact (mostly e-consultation forum and governmental sponsored Web forums), we found that the role of the external impact factor has, in fact, never been contradicted, which means that the deliberativeness of the online debates is not negatively correlated to the intensity of the impact of the online forum, and has been convincingly verified for the deliberative criteria of reciprocity, empathy, and reflexivity. This finding suggests that the forums that are perceived as having a strong political

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impact are more likely to be characterized by respectful and reciprocal exchanges and to encourage its active and passive users to revise critically their own opinions and beliefs. In conclusion, it would obviously be overoptimistic and erroneous to assert that the virtualization of the online debates corresponds to the sociological evolution that will contribute to transforming our liberal democracies, essentially based on a political relation of conflict and competition between elites, into deliberative democracies that would be characterized by more inclusive and discursive sociopolitical relations. It is more correct to affirm that the virtualization of the political debates is a phenomenon that could, under certain circumstances, contribute to promoting the deliberative values and procedures within the existing political processes. This can happen if the Web-based debates continue to attract new users, if they are implemented in strategic places, particularly the ones that have an impact on the decision-making process, and if they are elaborated in order to promote inclusive and deliberative forms of debate. In other words, the new electronic agoras offer interesting opportunities to promote deliberative practices, but the question is whether these will be coherently exploited by the different public and private actors. This is where a new deliberative model of democracy—which would be rooted in and modeled on the basis of a systematic, empirical assessment of its feasibility—could have a major guiding function.

Notes Chapter 1 1. “In London patches were placed on the right or the left side of the face, depending on whether one were Whig or Tory; During the reign of Louis XV, patches were placed to indicate the character of the Parisian: at the corner of the eye stood the passion; center of the cheek, gay; nose, saucy. A murderess was supposed to wear patches on her breasts” (Sennet 1977, 70). 2. Nowadays such spontaneity based on artificiality may appear as a paradox that Sennet formulates as follows: “How can people whose lives are governed by impersonal and abstract convention be so spontaneous, so free to express themselves? All the complexity of the ancien régime city lies in that seeming paradox. Their spontaneity rebukes the notion that you must lay yourself bare in order to be expressive. To conceive of the natural man as an expressive creature, and the social man as a being whose thoughts and feelings are weak, fractured, or ambivalent because they are not truly his own, became Romantic common sense after the Great Revolution, and then passed in both intellectual and popular culture” (Sennet 1977, 73). 3. According to Calhoun, this can be explained because “the notion of common interest in truth and right policy undergirded the bracketing of status difference” (Calhoun 1992, 13). 4. “However exclusive the public might be in any given instance, it could never close itself off entirely and become consolidated as a clique; for it always understood itself immersed within a more inclusive public of all private people” (Habermas 1989, 37). 5. Sennet makes the striking argument that the strong valorization of the family as morally superior finds its roots in the discovery, in the mideighteenth century, that the child was not an adult but a fragile person in need of attention and protection. Nurturance, which came to be seen as the new natural function of the family, detached the family from “social arrangements” and the physical and sentimental rapprochement of the member of the family corresponded to a “natural sympathy.” In other words, “the family became the proper place for the simplicity of adults to express itself ” (Sennet 1977, 97).

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6. “Every self is in some measure a cabinet of horrors, civilized relations between selves can only proceed to the extent that nasty little secrets of desire, greed, or envy are kept locked up” (Sennet 1977, 4–5). 7. “When two people are out of revelations, and the market exchange has come to an end, all too often the relationship comes to an end. It is exhausted because there is ‘nothing more to say’. Boredom is the logical consequence of intimacy as an exchange relationship” (Sennet 1977, 10). 8. “People in struggling to be a community become ever more absorbed in each other’s feelings, and ever more withdrawn from an understanding of, let alone a challenge to, the institutions of power so very willing to have ‘local participation’ and ‘local involvement’” (Sennet 1977, 310). 9. The Brunswick Center in London and the Defense Center in Paris are examples of buildings that are based on the idea of “making space contingent upon motion” and that therefore do not to allow the possibility human exchanges. These are, in other words, “public spaces and areas to move through not to be in” (Sennet 1977, 14). 10. “These terms of personality which govern face-to-face relationships in a community are likely to cut down the desire of people to experience those jolts which might occur in a more unfamiliar terrain. These jolts are necessary to human being to give him that sense of tentativeness about his own beliefs, which every civilized person must have. The destruction of a city of ghettos is both a political and a psychological necessity” (Sennet 1977, 296). 11. As Habermas puts it: “The interference of the state in private sphere since the end of the last century showed that the masses, now entitled to political participation, succeeded in translating economic antagonisms into political conflicts” (Habermas 1989, 46). 12. “The social-political compensation for the largely eroded basis of family property stretched beyond material income supplements to functional aid in managing life. For along with its functions in capital formation the family increasingly lost also the functions of upbringing and education, protection, care, and guidance … In general it lost its power to shape conduct in areas considered the innermost provinces of privacy by the bourgeois family. Thus in a certain fashion even the family, this private vestige, was deprivatized by the public guarantees of his status” (Habermas 1989, 155). 13. “The truth of the laws … was only guaranteed as long as the public sphere, elevated in the parliament to an organ of the state, made it possible to discover through discussion, what was practically necessary in the general interest”(Habermas 1989, 178). 14. “Institutionalized in the mass democracy of social-welfare state no differently that in the bourgeois constitutional state, the idea of publicity (at one time the rationalization of domination in the medium of critical public debate of private people) is today realizable only as a rationalization—limited of course because of the plurality of organized private interests—of the exercise of societal and political power under the

Notes

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16. 17.

18.

19.

20. 21.

22.

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mutual control of rival organizations themselves committed to publicity as regards both their internal structure and their interaction within one another and with the state” (Habermas 1989, 210). For data on the evolution of the blogosphere see the Web site of “Technocrati” which has implemented the principal research engines for tracking the principle blogging software (MSN spaces, Blogger, AOL Journal, LiveJournal, Xanga, etc.) This phenomenon does not seem to abate, since the dynamic figures reveal that the blogosphere continues to double every six months. It is interesting to note that civil society plays a very similar role of the played by the private/intimate sphere in the earlier version of its theory. She distinguishes (1) The private association: they tend to be inward looking and particularistic (neighborhood associations; religious clubs; social clubs, etc.). They generally have no impact on the political process, but on the opposite side, Young observes, as does Sennet, that private associations can be depoliticizing; (2) The civic association: They are primarily directed outward from those engaged in them to others. They intend to make some contribution to the collective life and generally rely on volunteer work and on donation of money. They sometimes develop civic activities that may be protopolitical (death penalty, promoting recycling, etc.); (3) Political associations: they aim to influence state policy formation or implementation or influence decisions of economic institutions without using state policy. These are, for example, parties, lobbying organizations, or special interest associations (Young 2000, 162–163). As they put it: “Deliberative process is not like a talk show or an academic seminar. The participants do not argue for argument’s sake; they do not argue even for truth’s sake (although the truthfulness of their arguments is a deliberative virtue because it is a necessary aim in justifying their decision). They intend their discussion to influence a decision the government will make, or affect how future decisions are made. At some point, the deliberation temporally ceases, and the leaders make a decision” (Gutmann and Thompson 2004, 5). This issue is all the more problematic in that, as this will be explained in the next chapter, there is an important disagreement among the deliberative democrats concerning the level of the decision-making process where the discursive requirements of democracy should be applied. For a presentation of the criticisms to these two approaches, see Habermas (1996, 329–330). Young insists on a “principle of inclusion” according to which “the normative legitimacy of a democratic decision depends on the degree to which those affected by it have been included in the decision-making processes and have the opportunity to influence the outcome” (Young 2000, 5). For an analysis of these different examples of deliberative participation, see Gastil and Levine (2005).

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23. The aim of this project, in which I had the honor to participate as an organizer of the Luxembourg consultation, is to create a multinational European public sphere on topics that citizens have themselves proposed. This very ambitious project is divided into three phases. During the first phase, 200 citizens from 25 countries meet in Brussels and determine, through a process of deliberation and voting, three issues that are considered to be the most important for the future of Europe. During the second phase held a few months later, each country organizes a national consultation where the topics are debated by a representative sample of citizens (between 50 and 200, depending on the countries), who further make some concrete propositions on these issues. These propositions are then included in the national report. In the third and final phase of the consultation, citizens from each country meet again and prepare a synthesis report of the opinions expressed in each country. This final European report is then distributed to all the stakeholders at the national and European levels. Please refer to the Web site of the European Citizens Consultation: http://www.european-citizens-consultations.eu/.

Chapter 2 1. The unit of coding, for most authors, is the individual message that is posted on the forum. An exception is Steenbergen et al., whose unit of coding is a “demand,” defined as: “a proposal on what decision should or should not be made” (Steenbergen et al. 2003). 2. As the authors put it “The trouble with prudential reason as a criterion for public decision-making is that some people have far greater bargaining power that others, and prudence authorizes them to use that power in a self-interested, or group-interested, way to gain still more benefits for themselves or their groups” (Gutmann & Thompson 2004, 148). 3. These are the definition of the different categories: —

Persuasion: the posters seem to be persuaded by another poster’s opinions or arguments — Progress: another posting is taken into account and the debater tries to bring the debate forward by reflecting and bringing in new opinions, arguments, and points. — Radicalization: another posting is taken into account in a negative manner; the debater radicalizes his/her points and/or the disagreements are increased.

4. The lurkers designate the users of the forum who just read the messages without actively participating in them. 5. They were asked, among other things, if “they learned something from other posters,” if they “made contact with new people,” “if they have changed their mind or opinions,” and to what extent they had the feeling that “the parliament was listening to them.”

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6. This position was defended by Habermas in his early writings (Habermas, 1989) and is still defended by authors such as Walzer (1991) and Sunstein (1993). 7. Habermas refers to the core institutions, which means that the deliberative requirements are not required to be enacted in all the governmental institutions. According to this approach, as long as legislatures are authorized to regulate other political institutions consistently with constitutional values, they might decide that some parts of the government, such as executive agencies, should not be made to engage in public deliberation. 8. According to Habermas, the weak public has the advantage of a medium of unrestricted communication where “new problem situations can be perceived more sensitively, discourses aimed at achieving self-understanding can be conducted more widely and expressively, collective identities and need interpretations can be articulated with fewer compulsions that is the case in procedurally regulated public spheres” (Habermas 1996, 308). 9. By the notion of authentic deliberation Dryzek means an idealized form of democratic governance through deliberation. Authentic deliberation reflects “the degree to which democratic control is engaged through communication that encourages reflection upon preferences without coercion … This condition is met to the degree that domination via the exercise of power, manipulation, indoctrination, propaganda, deception, expressions of mere self-interests, threats, and the imposition of ideological conformity are all absent. These distorting agents will diminish to the extent of equality in the deliberative competence across political actors” (Dryzek 2000, 8). 10. It is all the more surprising that Habermas defends such an empirical assumption as in his early writings he affirms that the legislative chambers have become places where instruction-bound appointees meet to put their predetermined decisions on record.

Chapter 3 1. It is interesting for us to note that among the Internet users that claimed to search for information, the Web sites that they declared to be their principal sources of information are the newspapers’ Web sites (63 percent), the general informative Web sites (50 percent), and the TV and radio Web sites (both 34 percent). Mentioned, to a lesser extent, are the Web sites of political parties (20 percent), the blogs of political personalities (19 percent), or of citizens (13 percent). Finally, the political forums were considered an importance source of political information for just one out of ten (10 percent) Internet users that declared going online for informative purposes (IFOP 2007, 17). 2. The question has been formulated in the following way: “There are different ways of being involved in political life in order to ensure that your

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3.

4. 5. 6.

7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12.

13.

14.

15.

voice is heard by the policymakers. Have you done any of the following in the last year?” More precisely, the question has been formulated as follows: “Which of the following political actions do you think is the MOST important to ensure that your voice is heard by the policymakers? I will read six possibilities, please select the MOST important ones”. For authors who advocate for a more direct form of democracy through the use of new technologies, see Toffler (1981) and Morris (1999). For the list of the 44 parliaments that responded to the questionnaire, see Coleman (2006, 384). This is much less than “current affairs Web sites” (40 percent) but also from other institutional Web sites such as the “Web sites of local council” (28 percent) and “government department/agencies Web sites” (21 percent). This was the case for Estonia, Slovenia, Finland, Slovakia, Portugal, Lithuania, Germany, Sweden, Hungary, Italy, and Poland. We should also mention the e-consultation procedures that were organized by the House of Commons (UK) through the Hansard Society (2006). These experiences, which will be analyzed more in-depth in the next chapter, were not indicated at the time of the research realized for the European-funded report STOA, probably because they were not visible on the Web site of the parliament. We performed a Web-based survey in July–August 2008. Out of 116 potential respondents, 47 mayors responded to the questionnaire. Multiple answers were allowed; an average of six items were mentioned by respondents. Interestingly, this same survey reveals that visiting municipal Web sites is more common among women than men and among older citizens than younger. A random sample of 2,000 local elected officials was drawn from the National League of Cities database of municipal officials. Officials were selected from cities with population greater than 10,000. In the end 520 cities responded (Pew 2002, 5). The mayors’ assessment of the level of citizen participation in local politics reveals that only 17 percent consider it insufficient, while almost half of them consider it average and one out of three positive (Dumont et al. 2009). This was much less than the trust expressed for other representative institutions such as government (34 percent), national parliament (38 percent), trade unions (39 percent), or charitable/voluntary organizations (66 percent) (EB 62 2005). One should note however that not all the parties that received less than three seats in the preceding elections are included because the national researchers had the freedom (no obligation) to measure the parties that received less than three seats in the lower house. This having been said,

Notes

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17.

18.

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taking into consideration even a limited amount of minor/fringe parties is useful for reaching a greater significance of the interactive offer of the parties’ Web sites. When looking at this score one should remember that some parties (19) that had no representatives at the lower chambers have been measured. These obviously could not indicate the e-mail address of inexistent MPs. For example, none of the four French parties or the nine Cypriote parties analyzed offered this feature. Among the nine Latvian parties analyzed, just one presented e-mail of MPs. Similarly, one out of the five parties analyzed in Luxembourg and two out of the height parties analyzed in the Slovak Republic offered this contact information. The three European parties (out of seven) that offer this feature are the Party of European Socialists, the European Liberal Democrat and Reform Group and Party, and The Greens / The European Free Alliance. The two (out of seven) German parties are the SPD (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschland) and CDU (Christlich Demokratische Union); and the two (out of three) Maltese parties to offer this feature are the Nationalist party and the Malta Labour Party. The four parties are FDP (Die Liberalen), SPD, Die Grünen, and CDU. The three parties are Czech Social Democratic Party (CSSD), Civic Democratic Party (ODS), and Christian Democratic Union (KDU). The three parties are GroenLinks, Socialistische partij (SP), and ChristenUnie.

Chapter 4 1. The topics of the e-consultation were “human reproduction technologies and the law,” “reconnecting parliament with the public,” “constitutional reform bill,” “hate crime in Northern Ireland,” and “diabetes care in the United Kingdom.” 2. Fuchs provides the following coding categories for affiliations: If there is a moderate affiliation, the author identifies positively once with an idea that is characteristic of a specific political ideology. If there is a strong affiliation, the author identifies at least twice with ideas that are characteristic of a political ideology, or (s)he directly expresses feelings of identification with and belonging to certain ideologies or parties. He then distinguishes and defines the following types of political ideologies: Communist/Marxist, Social Democrat, Greens, Liberals, Conservatives, Extreme Right. 3. Among the messages that expressed an affiliation—this was generally in favor of extreme ideologies—were essentially the extreme right one (60.8 percent) and the communist one (29.2 percent). 4. A total of 27 political values were identified by the author, and among the postings that referred to values the ones that scored the highest were

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5. 6. 7.

8.

9.

10. 11.

economic growth and efficiency, nation, home affairs, justice, equity, fairness, and democracy. We could not evaluate the “institutional plurality” since the Nordpol corresponds to an experimental procedure realized for just one time. On average 65 percent of the registered participants had never contacted an MP before and 77 percent had not previously given evidence to Parliament before. For the e-consultation on human reproductive technologies and law and the one on diabetes care in the UK, the majority of the registered users were female (respectively 51 percent and 56 percent); for the e-consultation on hate crime in Northern Ireland, men were just slightly more numerous than women (54.3 percent); and finally for the e-consultations on connecting the parliament with public and on constitutional reform bill, men were much more numerous (respectively 80 percent and 70 percent). This is the argument we developed in an article referring to the introduction of Internet voting. We argued that the Internet voting platform should also contain an online forum module—that we have defined as a “pre-voting sphere”—for this would have the potential to attract a great variety of different opinions (Kies & Kriesi, 2005). This measurement is part of the evaluative categorization “overall message style” that distinguishes messages that are “scientific,” “valueladen,” “aggressive,” “cynical,” “polemical-satirical,” “personal,” and “other.” As revealing factor of the high level of politeness, Beierle observed that “the dialogue message archived returned 191 items containing ‘thank you’, or ‘thanks’” (2002, 38). He suggests, for example, that “Newspapers could publish excerpts of forum discussions in their print edition, organize pro- and con- opinion pieces that are written by staff members versus active online readers, or encourage articles by journalists in cooperation with readers. Also, the media could present different versions of stories online and ask for comments” (Schultz 2000, 216).

Chapter 5 1. Its electoral weight is generally around 2–3 percent with the exception of the European elections of 1999, where it reached 8.5 percent, a score that is generally explained by the personality of Emma Bonino, ex–EU Commissioner, who was at that time particularly popular in Italy. 2. Data from May 28, 2007. 3. In order to reach a maximum of number of users and nonusers, the following strategies were applied: (i) the aim of the project and a link to the survey was introduced in the party’s weekly online newsletter; (ii) a thread was opened in the forum itself, where the aim of the project

Notes

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5. 6.

7.

8.

9.

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was presented and a link to the survey was indicated. People were also invited to post comments about their personal experiences of using the forum; (iii) a description of the research and link to the survey was sent to all the Radical Party’s Yahoo lists we had access to; and (iv) a description of the research and link to the survey was sent to a sample of members who were registered on the forum. This sample was composed of 1,200 people from a total of the 23,500 people registered. In order to guarantee a high rate of response, we sent the message to all members who had written at least two messages since the moment of their registration (around 900 people). The same message was also sent to a random sample of people who had written just one or no posts in the forum (around 230). Finally, the same message was sent to all the people who recently registered on the forum (since January 2004) and who had written no messages (around 170). The sample can never be proven to be representative for two main reasons. First, we are unaware of the sociopolitical characteristics of the forum users. Second, the people that participated in the survey participated via a process of self-selection, which constitutes an important bias for reaching the representativeness of a sample. This is the case, for example, of a person that was copy-pasting hundreds of pages of unrelated material and, as a consequence, made the forum unusable for other forumists. This data is subdivided as follows: 49 percent said “they know some of them,” 10.5 percent said “they know a large part of them,” 4.2 percent indicated “they know most of them,” and finally, 36.3 percent indicated “they don’t know any of them.” By looking at the percentages, it appears that five regions were particularly well represented: Lazio (17.8 percent), Tuscany (14.4 percent), Lombardy (13.2 percent), Piedmont (8 percent), and Emilia-Romagna (7.5 percent). The Radicali Italiani presents the particularity of having a great number of associations that are directly affiliated to it. These have been created in order to organize and pursue several political battles. Among these associations, one can mention the “Association Luca Coscioni,” which is in favor of the freedom of research, the “Association Hands of Cain” that aims to abolish the death penalty the world over, and the “Associazione radicale del detenuto ignoto,” which aims to make the public aware to problems occurring in prisons. It is interesting and important to note that we have been able to capture, through the survey, an important proportion of responsible members of the party. In fact, 13 out of 60 members of the national committee (21.6 percent), three out of ten members of the Giunta (30 percent), and six out of eighteen members of the executive board replied (30 percent). In other words, the higher up we go on the level of responsibility, the more likely the people are to participate in the survey.

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Chapter 6 1. According to a survey conducted in 2004 (Citizens Panel 2004), more than three out of four Internet users stated that the Internet is a good means of “allowing citizens to express themselves more,” “informing themselves about programmes and candidates,” “providing citizens with an improved channel of communication with councillors,” and “making more young people interested in politics.” And more than seven out of ten Internet users believed in the Internet’s curative effects for democracy in general: 73 percent said that “it can improve the workings of democracy” and 71 percent that “it can contribute to making more citizens interested in politics.” 2. The district councils contribute in two ways to the choice of participatory budgets. The first is the descending way: the district councils are consulted by the municipal council on all large projects involving their district (environment, public roads, sport, and cultural facilities). In parallel, the ascending way allows the district council to propose projects to the municipal council. Thus, each district council can finance up to EUR 152,500 for investment projects (e.g., play areas) and up to EUR 15,250 per year for local events (e.g., an open-air cinema festival). 3. The innovative electoral blogs were implemented thanks to the financial and conceptual support of the e-Agora project. The e-Agora project’s main aim is to promote the democratic use of the ICTS at the local level. It was financed by the European Commission (70%) and by the cities and organizers that took part in it (30%). The cities that were involved in the project were: Issy-les-Moulineaux (France), Frameries (Belgium), Juiz de Fora (Brazil), Ipatinga (Brazil), and Vina del Mar (Chile). For more information, see Virapatirin and Peixoto (2006). 4. According to the officials responsible for the online campaign, around 50 to 60 percent of candidates came to this training session. Some didn’t come because they already knew how to use this tool or because they didn’t want to contribute to the blog.

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INDEX age. See usage of Web forum Albrecht, Steffen, 43, 44, 80, 95, 99, 101, 109 Alleanza Nazionale, 97, 102 analysis, methods of comparative analysis, 4, 62–63, 95, 97, 99, 165 interviews, 49–52, 55–57, 98–100, 118–120, 127, 130, 131, 133–136, 139, 141, 164 participant observation, 52 surveys, 43–44, 49–52, 54–57, 98–101, 103, 107, 109, 111, 113, 115, 118–119, 126–142, 164 Web content analysis, 3, 45–52, 54–57, 97–99, 101, 105, 109, 113, 115, 118–120, 139, 164 AOL (America Online) journal, 169 see also newsgroups architecture decline of convivial architecture, 15–16 online discursive architecture, 68, 92, 96–97, 126–127, 165 see also public space “Association Hands of Cain,” 175 “Association Luca Coscioni,” 175 “associazione radicale del detenuto ignoto,” 175 “Avant-Garde Quebec,” 98 see also newsgroups

Beierle, Thomas, 44, 50, 54, 95, 98, 101, 103, 107, 109, 111, 113, 174 Bello Horizonte, 1 Bentivegna, Sara, 43, 45, 50, 95, 97, 100, 101, 102, 105, 108, 110 Berdal, Simon, 43, 51, 54, 95, 98, 101, 106, 109, 112, 113 Bernardini, Rita, 119, 120 Blogger, 169 blogs, 55, 66, 69–71, 93, 123, 115, 144, 146, 147–148, 150–162 Bonino, Emma, 174 Brunswick Center, 168 Calhoun, Craig, 11, 167 Capezzone, Daniele, 119, 131, 135 censorship, 123, 127, 142 see also, identification requirements; moderation practices cities’ Web sites, 20 interactive supplies, 4, 83–85, 164 see also Issy-les-Moulineaux opinions on e-participation, 80–81 usage, 82–83 citizens’ jury, 1, 36 citizens’ panel, 143, 145 civil society categories, 24, 163, 169 in Habermas’ theory, 19, 24–25, 36, 59 models of (deliberative) democracy, 4, 31, 40, 57–62, 79, 93–94

184

Index

civil society—(Continued) online interactive supply, 66, 73–74 Coleman, Stephen, 3, 43, 47, 50, 54, 55, 74, 75, 95, 172 common good, 37, 47–48 communities auto-referential, 13, 15 destructive “Gemeinschaft,” 20 fetichism of community, 17 ghettos, 15–16 Conover, Pamela, 62 consensus conference, 36 Coscioni, Luca, 132 Council of Europe, 2 Cybervote, 146–147 Dahlberg, Lincoln, 43, 48–52, 55 Davis, Richard, 3, 43, 54, 69, 95 Defense Center, 168 deliberative democracy criticism, 4, 32–37 definitions, 21–30 justification, 31–32 operationalization, 39–63 see also discursive criteria; models of deliberative democracy Demos, 98, 101, 107, 109 “Désir d’avenir,” 1 Desquinado, Nicolas, 95 discursive criteria. See empathy; equality; external impact criterion; inclusion; justification; plurality; reciprocity; reflexivity; respect; sincerity Dryzek, John, 41, 58–61, 94, 171 DS (Democratici di Sinistra) newsgroup, 97 party, 130 Dumont, Patrick, 68, 81, 172 Dumoulin Marc, 43, 53, 95, 98, 101, 102, 105, 108, 110, 111 e-Agora project, 176 e-consultation forums, 5, 55, 57, 70,

73, 75, 77–80, 83–84, 86–87, 92, 94, 95, 97–99, 101, 103, 105–115, 163–165, 172–174 see also Demos; EPA; Tellparliament education. See usage of Web forums Election Europe company, 146 elections American midterm elections 2006, 68–69, 92 American presidential elections 2004, 69, 92 European elections 1999, 174 French presidential elections 2007, 69–70, 87, 92 see also e-voting e-mail, 68, 71, 73, 75–78, 81–88, 92, 164 empathy, 4, 40, 42, 46, 50–52, 55, 56, 61, 96, 99, 100, 101, 108, 115, 120, 138, 139, 154, 158, 164–165 see also discursive criteria EPA (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency), 98, 107, 103, 113–114 equality, 4, 19, 21, 35, 40, 42–44, 56, 96, 115, 136, 137, 142, 154–156, 162, 164–165 see also discursive criteria Eurobarometers EB special survey 53, 87 EB standard 62, 172 flash EB 135, 2, 67 flash EB 202, 2, 67, 70 European Citizens’ Consultation (ECC), 36, 170 European Commission, 146 e-voting (or online voting) Issy-les-Moulineaux, 144–156 MP’s opinions, 77 Radicali Italiani, 118, 121, 122, 124–126, 132, 137 scenarios, 73, 86, 163 experimental Web forums, 5, 63, 95–101, 150–107, 109–111, 114–115

Index

external impact criterion, 42, 54, 55, 57, 99–101, 108, 112–115, 120, 136, 137, 142, 154, 159, 160, 164–166 see also discursive criteria external impact hypothesis, 5, 6, 118, 136, 137, 142, 144, 157 definition, 96, 140, 165 empirical findings, 96–98, 103–105, 107–108, 110–111, 114–115, 118, 127, 137, 142 Facebook, 19, 66 Fishkin, James, 36, 49, 62 Forza Italia, 97, 130 Frameries, 176 Fuchs, Christian, 47, 49, 53, 95, 98, 101, 102, 104, 105, 108, 110, 173 Gastil, John, 169 Gay right, 98, 105, 108 see also newsgroups Goetz, John, 3, 74 Graham, Todd, 40, 43–45, 48, 51, 52 Greffet, Fabienne, 95 Grippo, Antonio, 123 Grönlund, Kimmo, 78 Grossman, Lawrence, 3 Gutmann, Amy, 21, 25, 28, 32, 33, 41, 46, 58, 60, 169, 170 Habermas, Jürgen, 3, 7–13, 16–25, 33–36, 40, 41, 47, 54, 58–61, 63, 167–169, 171 Hands, Joss, 82–84 Hangemann, Carlo, 43, 45, 47, 54, 95 Hansard Society, 2, 49, 55, 95, 99, 101, 107, 111, 113, 172 Hill, John, 95 Hoff, Jens, 74, 75 House of Commons, 76, 172 Hughes, Kevin, 95

185

identification requirements, 97, 110, 122, 123, 127, 137, 165 IFOP (Institut français d’opinion publique), 2, 67, 69, 87, 171 inclusion, 21, 31, 35, 36, 37, 41–43, 56, 125, 136, 137, 154, 155, 164, 169 see also discursive criteria interactive municipal council, 143 Interpaliamentary union, 2 intimate sphere, 9, 11–13, 16–17, 19–20 IP (Internet protocol) adresses, 153 Ipatinga, 176 Issy-les-Moulineaux campaign dynamic, 150–153 campaign participants, 147–150 city presentation, 143–144 deliberativeness of campaign debates, 153–162 distric councils, 144–147 ISTAT (Italian National Institute of Statistics), 128, 129 Jankowski, Nicholas, 43, 47, 50, 80, 95 Janssen, Davy, 96 Jensen, Jakob, 40, 43, 44, 47–50, 54, 80, 95, 98, 101–104, 109, 111, 113 Juiz de Fora, 176 justification, 4, 23, 28, 30, 31, 33, 35, 37, 40, 41, 46–48, 50, 51, 56, 59, 61, 96, 99, 101, 103, 104, 107, 115, 120, 150, 154, 160, 164 see also discursive criteria Kies, Raphaël, 76, 81, 87, 96, 140, 172, 174 Kriesi, Hanspeter, 96, 140, 174 Lamartine, Alphonse (de), 14 legitimacy, moral, 28, 30, 31 Levine, Peter, 169 Levinsen, Klaus, 81, 82

186

Index

LiveJournal, 169 Louis XV, 167 lurker, 170 Luskin, Robert, 62 Lusoli, Wainer, 68 Mair, Peter, 85 manifestoes (electoral), 149 models of deliberative democracy critical democratic model of deliberative democracy, 4, 40, 59, 61, 93–94 globalizing model of deliberative democracy, 4, 40, 57 impact model of deliberative democracy, 4, 40, 60 two-track model of deliberative democracy, 4, 40, 58, 59, 61 models of democracy aggregative model of democracy, 8, 21, 25–33 deliberative model of democracy, 7–8, 20–21, 23, 25–26, 28–34, 37–38, 41, 61, 62, 166 liberal model of democracy, 7, 21, 24, 25, 26, 31, 33 republican model of democracy, 7, 21, 22, 23, 24, 26, 31, 33, 37 moderation practices, 43, 56, 65, 97–98, 102, 108–110, 123, 165 Molinari, Sergio, 133 Monnoyer-Smith, Laurence, 95 Morris, Dick, 172 MSN, 71, 169 MySpace, 19, 71 newsgroups, 4–5, 20, 55, 63, 69, 95, 97–98, 100–115, 165 see also AOL; Avant-Garde Québec; Gay right; Politikforum.at; Polo delle libertà; Ulivo; Western Thoughts of Separation

newspapers’ online forums, 5, 172 Debattcentralen (DC), 98 Guardian Unlimited Talk (GUT), 98 New York Times, 98, 101, 106, 112 Spiegel Online, 98 Nordpol, 98, 101–102, 106, 109, 113, 158 Norris, Pippa, 3, 85 Obama, Barack, 1, 2 OECD, 2 offer of online forums cities, 80–85 hypothesis, 72–74 parliaments, 74–79 political parties, 85–91 ombudsman, 77 opinions change of, 49, 56 critical opinion formation, 9, 11, 13, 18, 19 manipulation of, 18 polarization of, 3, 20, 32–33, 37, 165 processes of opinion formation, 20–25, 28–31, 34–36, 57–63 see also models of democracy; public space opinion polls deliberative opinion poll, 36 online opinion poll, 70, 73, 77–78, 87–88, 123 Opinion Way, 143 Palma, Carmelo, 133 Pannella, Marco, 119, 121, 130 Parliaments functions, 18 interactive supply, 4, 76–80, 164 opinions on e-participation, 74–76 usage of Web sites, 76

Index

participatory budgeting, 1, 36, 80, 145, 152, 161 Peixoto, Tiago, 80, 176 personalization of politics, 14–15 see also public space: decline petitions, on- and off-line, 70–73, 78 PEW (Research Center of the People and Press), 67, 68, 81, 82, 172 Phillips, Macon, 2 Pina, Vincente, 82–84 plurality, 4, 20, 24, 30, 31, 42, 53, 54, 57, 96, 99, 100, 101, 105–111, 115, 120, 136, 137, 138, 141, 154–156, 164–165 see also discursive criteria Poirier, Philippe, 68, 81, 172 political interest. See usage of Web forums political parties functions, 17–18 interactive supply, 4, 87–91, 164 newsgroups, 95–97, 102, 105–106, 109–110 trust, 85–86 usage of Web sites, 87 see also public space: decline; offer of online forums; Radicali Italiani politik-forum.at, 98 see also newsgroups Polo, 97 see also newsgroups psychological instability, 13–14 see also public space: decline public space (or sphere) bourgeois, 11–12, 16, 17, 20 commercialization, 17 decline, 3, 12–18 origins, 3, 9–12 pre-electoral, 5 revival, 18–19 strong, 54, 59, 61, 63, 97, 100, 103, 104, 106, 110, 111, 113, 140–141

187

weak, 48, 59, 61, 63, 97, 100–105, 111, 140–141, 171 see also intimate sphere Radicali Italiani (Italian Radicals) Agora BBS, 117, 118, 120, 122, 126, 133 analysis of forum participation, 124–128 characteristics of Web forum, 120–124 deliberativeness of Web forum, 136–142 functions of Web forum, 130–136, 164 history, 117–118 methodology, 118–120 radio radicale, 120, 126, 130 users’ profile, 127–130 reciprocity, 4, 40, 42, 44–46, 48, 50, 56, 96, 99–103, 110, 111, 115, 120, 154, 156–158, 162, 164–165 see also discursive criteria reflexivity, 4, 40, 42, 46, 48–51, 54, 56, 96, 99, 100, 101, 110, 111, 115, 135, 137, 139, 140, 164–165 see also discursive criteria respect, 13, 14, 29, 30, 32, 33, 37, 40, 41, 46, 50, 51, 56, 100, 102, 103, 108–110, 115, 127, 137–142, 159–160, 165 see also discursive criteria Rifondazione communista, 130 Romanciuc, Mihai, 123 Royal, Ségolène, 1, 2 Saglie, Jo, 81–84 Santini, André, 143, 147 Sartori, Giovanni, 86 Schmitter, Philippe, 76, 85, 87 Schneider, Steven, 40, 43–45, 51, 95 Schultz, Tajnev, 95, 98, 101, 106, 109, 112, 174

188

Index

Scott, James, 80, 82–85 Searing, Donald, 62 Second Life, 19 Sennet, Richard, 3, 7–15, 17–21, 41, 63, 167–168 Setälä, Maija, 78 sincerity, 4, 33, 40, 42, 48, 50–52, 55–57, 61, 120, 139 see also discursive criteria sovereignty, 23–25, 27 State intervention, 16 role, 24, 26 see also public space: decline Steenbergen, Marco, 40, 47, 50, 62, 170 Steiner, Jürg, 62, 170 STOA (report for the European Parliament), 77, 88, 90, 172 Sunstein, Cass, 3, 20, 41, 171 Tanner, Eliza, 95 “Technocrati,” 169 Tellparliament, 99, 101, 107, 111 Thompson, Dennis, 21, 25, 28, 32, 33, 39, 41, 46, 58, 60, 62, 96, 169, 170 Toffler, Alvin, 172 Torres, Lourdes, 82–84 Tsaliki, Liza, 47, 53, 95 UDF (Union pour la Démocratie Française), 69 Ulivo, 97 see also newsgroups United Nations, 2 universal suffrage, 12, 16 usage of Web forums and age, 70–72, 107, 128, 148 and civic involvement, 106, 107, 148 and education, 106, 128, 131, 138

in electoral periods, 68–70 at European level, 67–68 and gender, 106, 107, 108, 128–129, 147–148 and political interest, 128, 137, 139, 140, 142 and political preferences, 105, 108, 130 scenarios, 3, 4, 65–67 and socio-economic status, 106, 129, 165 see also external impact hypothesis; identification requirements; moderation practices Vabo, Signy, 81–84 Van Biezen, Ingrid, 85 Van Os, Renée, 43, 47, 50, 80, 95 Van Selm, Martine, 95 Vina del Mar, 176 Virapatirin, Marie, 80, 176 Voting Advice System, 163 Walzer, Michael, 171 Ward, Stephen, 75, 76, 86, 118 Western Thoughts of Separation, 98, 105, 108 see also newsgroups White House Web site, 1 Wiklund, Hans, 81, 83, 84 Wilhelm, Anthony, 40, 47, 51, 53, 95, 97, 101, 102, 104, 105, 110, 112 Wojcik, Stéphanie, 95 Xanga, 169 Yahoo lists, 175 Young Iris, 21, 24, 25, 28, 35, 36, 41–43, 50, 169 YouTube, 66

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