research-article

Investigating incidence of common ground and alternative courses of action in an online forum

Authors:

Jess Kropczynski,

John M. CarrollAuthors Info & Claims

dg.o '14: Proceedings of the 15th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research

Pages 24 - 33

https://doi.org/10.1145/2612733.2612749

Published: 18 June 2014 Publication History

Abstract

Online forums support civic discourses on local politics, but it is not clear whether they generate decision-relevant outcomes. Using deliberative democracy as a theoretical lens, this paper proposes a coding scheme for understanding the progress of citizens' deliberation through content analysis from a naturally occurring online discussion of a local planning project. By comparing patterns of this online discourse with normative views of deliberative dialogues, we found that important indicators of the deliberative ideal are missing. Our results show that citizens were not able to move towards advanced phases of deliberation as prescribed by deliberative democracy theory; and explain why it failed to develop common ground and joint assessment of alternative courses of action. We further explore possible causes of such patterns and identified a number of barriers that make online discussions less optimal to achieve common ground and collective judgment. Based on such findings, we suggest ways to improve deliberative outcomes by introducing active facilitation and advanced information support.

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https://doi.org/10.1109/BigData.2017.8258075

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Investigating incidence of common ground and alternative courses of action in an online forum

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cover image ACM Other conferences

dg.o '14: Proceedings of the 15th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research

June 2014

365 pages

ISBN:9781450329019

DOI:10.1145/2612733

General Chairs:
Gabriel Puron-Cid
Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas
,
Scott Robertson
University of Hawaii
,
Program Chairs:
Jing Zhang
Clark University
,
J. Ramon Gil-Garcia
Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas

Copyright © 2014 ACM.

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Published: 18 June 2014

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dg.o '14: 15th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research

June 18 - 21, 2014

Aguascalientes, Mexico

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Cited By

Du YHerzog ALuckow ANerella RGropp CApon A(2017)Representativeness of latent dirichlet allocation topics estimated from data samples with application to common crawl2017 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (Big Data)10.1109/BigData.2017.8258075(1418-1427)Online publication date: Dec-2017
https://doi.org/10.1109/BigData.2017.8258075

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