Promises and limits of web-deliberation

Abstract

In this work we will attempt to evaluate which of these scenarios is most likely to become prominent in the future by focusing essentially on three issues: 1) the usage of the online forum by observing how diffuse the phenomenon is and who the users of the online debates are; 2) The offer of the online political forum, by analyzing which are the political actors (civil society, media, institutional actors) who are more susceptible to host the online political debates; and 3) the quality of the online debates by assessing their deliberativeness. By elaborating a sophisticated method for measuring the deliberativeness of the online debates and by analyzing a great variety of online debates our objective is to provide an appreciation of the deliberative potential of the web-debates that avoids shortcuts and inappropriate generalizations, but that recognizes that this may be determined by a multiplicity of factors. From a theoretical perspective the results obtained through our investigations contribute to evaluate whether the deliberative model of democracy could be fostered by the virtualization of the political debates and, more generally, it should also contribute to the elaboration of a deliberative model of democracy that is grounded not only on theoretical principles and suppositions, as this tends to be the case, but also on empirical studies that test its adaptability to the 'real life politics'.