Understanding Divergent Patterns of Political Discussion in Online Forums—Evidence from the European Citizens' Consultations

ABSTRACT

This study examines divergent patterns of political discussion through a comparative analysis of 28 online forums, initiated by the European Commission as part of the 2009 European Citizens' Consultations. These forums shared the same design (technological and process) and had the same connection to the policy process. Still, great divergences were apparent in the intensity of discussion between the forums. The aim of this article is to create an understanding of these divergences. A hypothetic deductive approach is first employed, investigating three hypotheses about favorable conditions for political discussion grounded in prior studies and deliberative democratic theory. The results indicate that political discussions are more intense in forums where the level of consensus among participants is low. Thereafter, a comparative case study is conducted of two forums in order to foster a deeper understanding of these results, which showed that a high level of consensus was created through efforts of organized groups to mobilize support for their positions. The results of the analyses make it evident that online political discussion must be studied and understood in relation to an actor-centered perspective investigating participants' strategies and conduct.

Keywords:

• Consensus
• European Union
• online deliberation
• political discussion forums

Notes

1. For more information, visit the project Web site: http://www.european-citizens-consultations.eu/

2. In Belgium, two forums were launched: one in French for the Walloon region and one in Dutch for the Flemish region.

3. Visitors who had not registered as participants were not restricted from any area of the forums but could view all discussion posts, proposals, and all statistics on voting and participants.

4. The selection of moderators was not steered by the central organization of the ECC, but by each local organizer. Therefore there was no common criteria for which qualities the moderators should have.

5. I owe a great debt of thanks to Romain Badouard, who suggested the methodology for this measurement.

6. Other examples include a group supporting the diffusion of Esperanto in education and as a work language in Europe, as well as a group supporting the legalization of marijuana. For an examination of the conduct of these groups on the Swedish ECC forum, see Karlsson, 2010.

7. http://www.europeisk-medborgarkonsultation.eu/se/proposal/2052; http://www.europeisk-medborgarkonsultation.eu/se/proposal/2046. Retrieved March 12, 2010.

8. http://www.europeisk-medborgarkonsultation.eu/se/debate/2042; http://www.europeisk-medborgarkonsultation.eu/se/debate/2041. Retrieved March 12, 2010.

9. This fact indicates a weakness in the solely quantitative measurement of mobilization used here for understanding the impact of online mobilization. Since no measurement is available that shows the traffic of participants derived from each incoming link, this suboptimal measurement is the best available option.

10. The average deviation from the mean value in a distribution.

11. The relationship between mobilization around a proposal and the voting support it received was diverse. While some of the proposals that received many incoming links also displayed success in the voting competition (for example, the proposal “Esperanto as a common work language in Europe” received 33.7% of the incoming links and almost one-fifth of the votes in the Swedish forum), other proposals around which intense efforts were made to mobilize support received very few votes (for example, the Romanian proposal “Standardization of education in Europe,” which gathered about 20% of the links but only 2.2% of the votes).

12. This was true for the PP, the Esperanto group, the legalization group, and an environmentalist group. All of these groups were organized in other online spaces outside ECC forums and mobilized support for their proposals within their networks online.