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Abstract
There is a perception that citizen deliberation brings about higher-quality discussions than discussions where deliberative norms are not used. Often, deliberations are realised in mini-publics in which certain contextual features ensure, a priori, that the discussions are likely to be of a high quality. However, few studies have as yet explored the boundaries of deliberation; that is, contemplated what happens to discussion quality if the ideal-speech situation is strayed away from. To address this point, this article reports on an online experiment in which the discursive setting of citizen deliberations is manipulated. The experiment (n = 50 participants) was carried out online in Finland in November 2013 in order to test the impact on discussion quality related to two factors: the temporality (asynchronous or synchronous discussions) and identifiability of participants (known or anonymous) in an online deliberation. The findings clearly indicate that asynchronous discussions have the most positive influence on discussion quality. Moreover, the identifiability factor only had a small weak influence on discussion quality, and there was only one weak interaction effect between the two factors.
DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
FUNDING
This work was funded by the Academy of Finland. Project nr. 137813.
Notes
1. The number of participants was not equal in all cells due to some participants dropping out at the very last moment before the discussion.
2. The precise figures were calculated with the aid of an online calculator: http://www.stat.ubc.ca/~rollin/stats/ssize/n2.html.
Additional information
Kim Strandberg (corresponding author) is Associate Professor at the social science research institute at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Business and Economics, Åbo Akademi University, Vasa, Finland.
Janne Berg is a PhD student at the social science research institute at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Business and Economics, Åbo Akademi University, Vasa, Finland. Email: [email protected]