Promises and Limits of Web-deliberation

Abstract

Does the increasing usage of online political forums lead to a more deliberative democracy? This book answers to this question by presenting the evolution of the public spaces in a historical perspective, by defining and operationalizing the deliberative criteria of democracy, and by measuring and evaluating the impact ofvirtualization of the political debates under threes perspectives. It looks at the extent to which different categories of the population debate online, it looks at the categories of actors hosting online political forum, and it assesses the quality of the online political debates in different contexts. The final aim of this work is to provide a more balanced evaluation of the impact of virtualization of the political debates and to enrich the evolving deliberative theory with new findings.