Demographics and (Equal?) Voice: Assessing Participation in Online Deliberative Sessions

Kennedy, Ryan; Sokhey, Anand Edward; Abernathy, Claire; Esterling, Kevin M.; Lazer, David; Lee, Amy; Minozzi, William; Neblo, Michael A.

doi:10.1177/0032321719890805

Cited by 16 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 60 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Men are more politically participative in both social media (Bode, 2017) and in other online activities such as commenting on news sites or political blogs, posting political videos to YouTube, and visiting websites of parties or political organizations (Wen et al, 2013). However, other studies on online political participation have found inconsistent results (Gil de Zúñiga et al, 2010;Kennedy et al, 2021;Vochocová et al, 2016). Relative to young adults and adolescents, the pattern seems to follow the trend of adults.…”

Section: Theoretical Explanations Of Gender Differencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gender differences in civic and political engagement and participation among Italian young people

Stefani

Prati

Tzankova

et al. 2021

Soc. Psychol. Bull.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

A substantial amount of literature has revealed gender gaps in political participation. However, little is known about such gaps when using more comprehensive measures of civic and political participation including online participation. In the present study, we recruited a sample (n = 1792) of young people living in Italy. Controlling for age, majority/minority status, socioeconomic status, respondents’ educational attainment, and parents’ educational attainment, we found that female participants reported higher scores on online and civic participation, while male participants were more likely to report political and activist participation. The effect size for these gender differences was small. In addition, we did not find any gender differences in voting behavior in the last European parliamentary elections, national parliamentary elections, and local elections. These findings highlight the need to move toward a more comprehensive and detailed picture of gender gaps in political engagement and participation including different types of participation.

show abstract

Section: Theoretical Explanations Of Gender Differencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gender differences in civic and political engagement and participation among Italian young people

Stefani

Prati

Tzankova

et al. 2021

Soc. Psychol. Bull.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The remaining publications (34) focused on general platform design or numerous design features in the same paper. Among these publications, other popular themes of discussion included participant anonymity vs. identity e.g., Rhee and Kim (2009); Rose and Saeb (2010); Gonçalves et al (2020) and the use of asynchronous vs real-time discussion or text-based vs. video deliberation e.g., Osborne et al (2018); Kennedy et al (2020).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reason against the machine? Future directions for mass online deliberation

Shortall¹,

Itten²,

Meer³

et al. 2022

Front. Polit. Sci.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Designers of online deliberative platforms aim to counter the degrading quality of online debates. Support technologies such as machine learning and natural language processing open avenues for widening the circle of people involved in deliberation, moving from small groups to “crowd” scale. Numerous design features of large-scale online discussion systems allow larger numbers of people to discuss shared problems, enhance critical thinking, and formulate solutions. We review the transdisciplinary literature on the design of digital mass deliberation platforms and examine the commonly featured design aspects (e.g., argumentation support, automated facilitation, and gamification) that attempt to facilitate scaling up. We find that the literature is largely focused on developing technical fixes for scaling up deliberation, but may neglect the more nuanced requirements of high quality deliberation. Furthermore, current design research is carried out with a small, atypical segment of the world's population, and little research deals with how to facilitate and accommodate different genders or cultures in deliberation, counter pre-existing social inequalities, build motivation and self-efficacy in certain groups, or deal with differences in cognitive abilities and cultural or linguistic differences. We make design and process recommendations to correct this course and suggest avenues for future research.

show abstract

“…Little is known about these questions (that pertain to the boxes highlighted by bold lines in Figure 1). Communicative asymmetries have been studied in easily observable real-world arenas of communication like deliberative mini-publics and online platforms as well as in laboratory experiments (Steiner, 2012, p. 46-49;Mendelberg et al, 2014;Gerber, 2015;Carlson and Settle, 2016;Siu, 2017;Beauvais, 2021;Kennedy et al, 2021), but with few exceptions (Cowan and Baldassarri, 2018) hardly ever with regard to everyday political talk as it spontaneously and informally occurs in people's lifeworld. Against this background, the following analyses attempt to break new ground by shedding light into the "black box of interaction" (Mendelberg et al, 2014) in citizens' casual conversations about politics.…”

Section: The Discursive Conception Of Political Inequalitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Asymmetric Communication and Internal Exclusion in Everyday Political Talk

Schmitt‐Beck

2022

Front. Polit. Sci.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Citizens' everyday political talk is the foundation and mainspring of deliberative democracy. Accordingly, citizens' equal and inclusive participation in political discussions is deemed crucial for this “talk-centric” vision of normatively superior democratic will-formation. Yet, discussing politics is a quite demanding activity, and research has shown that de facto not everyone has equal access to this arena of political communication. Some citizens talk about public affairs almost constantly, others more sparingly, and yet others not at all. These inequalities reflect imbalances in structural and psychological resources. Little is known, however, about what happens once individuals have entered conversations about public affairs. The article breaks new ground by examining communicative asymmetries that ordinary people experience when talking about politics with members of their overall and core networks. By muting their voices they disadvantage certain citizens, thus impairing the discursive equality that is essential for deliberative democracy. Drawing on a unique high-quality survey conducted in Germany, the article finds such experiences to take different forms of which some are quite widespread. Many citizens resort to passive listening and contribute little to unfolding conversations. Smaller shares misrepresent their true standpoints, change subjects to avoid problematic topics, drop out of unpleasant conversations, or feel silenced by other interlocutors. The article contextualizes these communicative asymmetries in the broader theoretical framework of deliberative democrats' conception of discursive inequality. To examine how they come about it proposes and tests a model of internal exclusion that refers to social structural inequality, psychological dispositions, and attributes of the discussant networks within which political conversations take place. Social structural inequality is found to be of limited relevance. Individuals' communicative efficacy and orientations toward political conflict are more important predictors of their ability to cope with the challenges of political talk than aspects of general politicization like political interest, attitude strength and internal efficacy. Encountering political disagreement is normatively central for deliberative democracy, but empirically it stands out as a powerful social driver of asymmetric communication. Its impact is strongly conditioned by individuals' structural attributes and psychological dispositions.

show abstract

Demographics and (Equal?) Voice: Assessing Participation in Online Deliberative Sessions

Cited by 16 publications

References 60 publications

Gender differences in civic and political engagement and participation among Italian young people

Gender differences in civic and political engagement and participation among Italian young people

Reason against the machine? Future directions for mass online deliberation

Asymmetric Communication and Internal Exclusion in Everyday Political Talk

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About