One-Sided Discussions: Deliberation in Weblogs during the 2009 National Election

Abstract

Against the backdrop of the 2008 Obama campaign, participatory online tools were one main component of parties' campaigning strategy in Germany 2009. They used a wide variety of online tools to communicate directly with the voters. While political actors reiterated to accentuate the discursive potential of such tools, sceptics questioned whether such instrumental campaign communication can facilitate sound political discussions. The article analyses whether or not the internet fostered citizen participation during the 2009 national election campaign for the German Bundestag. A content analysis of the posts and comments in the weblogs of the major parties, CDU and SPD, was conducted. Results reveal that participation took place only on a very low level. Furthermore, the few comments published (370 in four weeks) failed to meet basic requirements of deliberation such as objectivity or argumentativity. Moreover, both parties actively prevented a free discourse as single comments may not have been authorised.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Very special thanks to Hans Mathias Kepplinger for help and inspiration with regard to the planning and realisation of the study. I also thank two anonymous reviewers for their contribution to the article.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jörg Haßler, MA, has been working as Research Assistant in the Department of Communication at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany, since October 2014. Prior to that (at the time of writing), he was Research Assistant at the Department for Empirical Methods in Communication Studies at the Institute of Communication Research at the Friedrich-Schiller-University of Jena, Germany. He has a degree in communication research and political science. His research interests include political communication and online communication.

Notes

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