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Under Construction: The Field of Online DeliberationResearchStephen Coleman a & Giles Moss aa The Institute of Communications Studies , University of LeedsAccepted author version posted online: 02 Nov 2011.Published online: 01 Feb 2012.

To cite this article: Stephen Coleman & Giles Moss (2012) Under Construction: The Field of Online Deliberation Research,Journal of Information Technology & Politics, 9:1, 1-15, DOI: 10.1080/19331681.2011.635957

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Journal of Information Technology & Politics, 9:1–15, 2012Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN: 1933-1681 print/1933-169X onlineDOI: 10.1080/19331681.2011.635957

GUEST EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION

Under Construction: The Field of OnlineDeliberation Research

How might we describe the development ofonline deliberation as a field of research andpractice? How should we interpret its signifi-cance? In this introductory essay to the SpecialIssue, we argue that deliberative citizenship isbest thought of as a construction, rather thansomething naturally occurring and given, andthat the modest field of online deliberationhas contributed to its contemporary enactment.Researchers and practitioners of online delib-eration tend to deny their hand in constitutingdeliberative citizenship, since they continue toassume, if only implicitly, that the deliberativecitizen is a natural and universal phenomenon,not a constructed one. We argue instead thatthe deliberative citizen is a construction all theway down, a contingent product of a particularset of discourses and practices, and that onlinedeliberation research plays an important role inenacting as well as studying deliberative citi-zenship (Cruikshank, 1999; Law & Urry, 2004;Olson, 2008; Osborne & Rose, 1999).

In arguing that the deliberative citizen isconstructed, and that the field of online delib-eration is implicated in its construction, we donot want to suggest that these efforts are notdesirable and should be discouraged. We do,however, want to underscore the contingent and“effectively contestable” (Freeden, 2004) natureof any particular form of citizenship and toinvite serious reflection, in the absence of anymetaphysical certainties, on the political andnormative consequences of different discoursesand practices of citizenship (Pykett, Saward, &Schaefer, 2010; Saward, 2003).

How then might we evaluate the ways inwhich deliberative citizenship has tended to beenacted in online deliberation research and prac-tice? After all, while citizenship is always aconstructed notion, not all processes of citizenformation are the same. We shall conclude thisintroductory essay by arguing for online delib-erative research and practice to be normativelydriven by an effort to produce democraticallyreflexive citizens; to align our work with the lesspowerful rather than reproducing the power ofthe already dominant; and to pay more attentionto the power-mediated relationship between cit-izen inputs and institutional outputs. Regardlessof whether others share our normative com-mitment, our epistemological argument is thatone cannot separate discursive constructions ofterms such as citizenship, democracy, and delib-eration from attempts to measure or evaluatetheir existence.

Our argument proceeds as follows.In Section 1 we outline competing concep-tions of citizenship and explain the historicalemergence of deliberation as a prominent ideaamong democratic theorists and reformers.We argue that citizenship is a constructed andcontested concept, and we consider four ofthe most common constructions of citizen-ship, concluding with the deliberative citizen.In Section 2 we explore the development ofonline deliberation as a field of research andpractice and how it entails the construction of aparticular conception of deliberative citizenship.In Section 3 we reflect upon the implicationsof our analysis and offer some ideas for a

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future research agenda. We then conclude byintroducing the individual contributions to thespecial issue that follow.

DELIBERATIVE CITIZENSHIP

The question of civic competence is usuallyleft to lurk in what Robert Dahl (1989) callsthe “shadow theory of democracy” (pp. 3–5).Discussions about democratic participation tendto assume, if only implicitly, that the capacitiesand types of conduct required for active citi-zenship are natural and universal ones. Indeed,to think otherwise seems to threaten to put thecentral democratic ideal of political equality inquestion. It risks siding with those, from Platoto Schumpeter, who have argued against greatercitizen participation in politics and in favor ofrule by elites. Insofar as democratic citizen-ship presupposes certain forms of often quitedemanding conduct, however, the question ofwhat capacities and traits citizens require, andhow these competencies are developed, cannotbe so easily avoided (Barnett, 2003). The abilityof individuals to make the most of their rightsand exercise them in a responsible manner is notnatural and does not emerge spontaneously. It hasto be learned, developed, and practiced throughprocesses of socialization, both primary and sec-ondary (Conover & Searing, 1994; Easton &Dennis, 1967; Shah, McLeod, & Lee, 2009;Torney-Purta, 2000). The various ways in whichthe idea of citizenship is constructed reflect theseassumptions about the potential for civic compe-tency, confounding what has been learned withwhat is natural.

Our aim in what follows is to recognizeand typologize four of the most commonconstructions of citizenship that online theo-rists and practitioners have inherited as part oftheir conceptual repertoire for thinking about therelationship between the Internet and democ-racy. Like any typology, some features will over-lap the boundaries of each category, and therewill be an inevitable empirical variance betweennormative descriptions and applied models.

We begin by acknowledging the self-styledrealistic model of citizenship, which tends toplace minimal responsibilities upon citizens,

believing them to be too busy, insufficientlyattentive, and, perhaps, cognitively incapable ofdoing more than observe political affairs from adistance and voting occasionally for whicheverleader or party seems to be most worthy oftheir support. As Schumpeter (1976) put it,“Democracy means only that the people havethe opportunity of accepting or refusing the menwho are to rule them” (p. 284). Dismissingin the name of “realism” the capacity of citi-zens to play a significant or permanent role inpublic decision-making, proponents of this con-ception of citizenship have emphasized a morerelaxed, monitorial function for the citizenry.As Schudson (2000) has described, monitorialcitizens

should be informed enough and alertenough to identify danger to their personalgood and danger to the public good. Whensuch danger appears on the horizon, theyshould have the resources—in trusted rela-tionships, in political parties and electedofficials, in relationships to interest groupsand other trustees of their concerns, inknowledge of and access to the courts aswell as the electoral system, and in rele-vant information sources to jump into thepolitical fray and make a lot of noise. (p. 3)

The role of the media in this context is toserve as a sophisticated fire alarm, with journal-ists ever-ready to alert citizens to personal andpublic dangers and point them towards trustwor-thy institutions capable of addressing their con-cerns. For such “realists,” e-democracy might beconfined to the provision of a broad range ofpublic information online, expanded opportuni-ties to access government services at the click ofa mouse, and perhaps even some limited waysof interacting with the powers-that-be throughe-mails and online surveys. As a conception ofcitizenship-lite, this has the virtue of not rais-ing expectations about anyone’s contribution todemocracy; it seems to assume that democraticnorms can be realized while most citizens arebusy getting on with their own lives, obliviousto the public sphere.

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A second conception of citizenship is rootedin metaphors of the marketplace. The individ-ual citizen is regarded here as a free agent, outto maximize personal gain. More like bargain-hunting consumers than Athenian-style mem-bers of a community, citizens so conceivedare expected to steer clear of anything resem-bling a responsibility to be socially informed.Libertarian theorists (Berger & Neuhaus, 1977)paint such civic self-serving as a preconditionof liberty; rational choice theorists (Aldrich,1993; Mueller, 2003) are less sanguine, contend-ing that citizens are simply trapped within thesystemic logic of collective action, doomed toseek low information costs and opportunities tofreeload on the civic energies of others.

The role of the media in this civic con-text is utilitarian: to provide individual citizenswith enough information to help them pursuetheir day-to-day personal interests. Democracyis played out in a sort of marketplace of ideasin which a combination of acute strategy andbroad appeal raises some interests to the topof the political agenda, while dismissing oth-ers to the valueless margins. In this context,e-democracy would describe uses of the Internetby competing individuals and interest groups tosecure their own information needs and socialadvantages at the expense of others. As in themore regulated and prohibitive spaces providedby broadcast media or the press, the objectiveof political advocacy is to outwit, discredit, andnullify rival positions with a view to winning thegame of politics.

From the perspective of most post-Schumpeterian versions of normativedemocratic theory, the above two modelsof citizenship are regarded as parsimonious andimpoverishing. Without active participation bycitizens in public affairs, democratic theoristshave argued, the democratic project is some-thing of a sham: rule by elites in the name of thepeople, rather than rule by the people, who arecapable of holding governing elites to account.Since the 1960s, the participatory citizen hasbeen imagined, encouraged, and ultimatelyregarded as an indispensable actor withinmeaningful democracy. An acknowledgment onthe part of governments and policy experts thatthey cannot be expected to know everything,

especially in relation to the life of communities,has prompted a range of initiatives designedto promote participative citizenship. Frompublic consultations, neighborhood councils,and citizens’ juries to organized volunteering onlocal projects and attempts to bring civil-societyorganizations into the policy process, the idealof participatory democracy has been regardedas the best safeguard against political alienation.Ensuring that citizens are up to the challengeof becoming active participators has led tocivic skills being taught in schools through thecitizenship/civics curriculum, while at the sametime national and local governments have pro-moted a range of policies intended to “engagethe disengaged.” Of course, both participationand engagement are political and constructednotions, including a relatively narrow range ofactions (voting; following the news; joining par-ties, movements, and community associations;writing to elected representatives) and eitherignoring or discouraging others (demonstrat-ing, rioting, law-breaking, striking, ridiculingauthority). While all of these activities mightbe regarded as participatory or engaged citi-zenship, discourses of official recognition areeffective in differentiating between civic anduncivil participation. The media have playeda major part in all of this, opening themselvesup to public interaction through call-ins, studiodiscussions, outreach events, phone-votes, ande-mails from audience members. The rhetoric ofmedia participation is replete with democraticclaims, sometimes justifiable insofar as mediainteractivity does open up politics to citizensand citizens to one another. But there are alsoserious limitations: A populist vein runs throughmany of these participatory exercises, castingthe media as ever-mobile ringleaders, readyto stoke up emotions around the latest reasonfor public anger. Used in such formats, activecitizens can be reduced to one-line, vox popcaricatures, thrown into situations in which theimage of the brawling mob displaces publicdiscussion (Coleman & Ross, 2010). Evenwhen, as sometimes happens, media attemptsto involve the public do lead to new ideas,revealed experiences, and a sense that some-thing needs to be done, there is a lack of anyformal connection to institutions that can follow

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them up. Citizens experience the frustrationof seeming to be talking to themselves andoften give up, leaving the field even clearer forranters who are not particularly bothered aboutconstructive outcomes. All of this has led to atragic paradox: There exist more opportunitiesthan ever before for citizens wishing to havetheir say, via the media or directly to localand national governments, but there is a morepervasive sense of disappointment than everbefore that citizens are outside the citadels ofpower, and that those within do not know howto listen to them.

In the context of e-democracy, technologiesof participation have mushroomed, with govern-ments urging citizens to send them e-petitions,broadcasters inviting audiences to “have yoursay,” legislatures running online consultationsabout policies before them, and elected repre-sentatives blogging away, often impervious tothe feedback they receive (Coleman & Blumler,2009). Political elites have tended to makesimplistic equations between interactive mediaand more inclusive decision-making, but therehas been a colossal gulf between rhetoric andcultural change (Coleman & Blumler, 2010).Enthusiasm for participatory democracy stillpersists within governments and civil society,and new projects intended to exploit the Internetas a connecting channel between rulers andruled are emerging across the globe, but thereis a growing sense that inviting citizens to “getinvolved,” without offering them opportunitiesto determine and discuss the terms of theirengagement, is something less than democratic.

The failings of participatory democracy inits populist form have given rise to a renewedinterest in the deliberative idea of nurtur-ing informed, thoughtful citizens, whose expo-sure to one another’s experiences and argu-ments might equip them to perform a role asintelligent participants in their own governance.This transcends the traditional boundaries ofindirect, representative democracy, positing theidea of democracy as a forum in which issuesand policy proposals are debated and dis-cussed on their merits rather than a game inwhich the attainment and retention of power isthe principal goal (Dahlgren, 2005; Habermas,1991). However, the more that theorists call for

such a multiperspectival, rational, and consen-sual conception of citizenship, the more clearlyits absence becomes apparent. With very fewexceptions, the mass media, which are so goodat delivering basic information and entertain-ment, seem to have given up any practicalhope of serving as a critical forum for citizens’debate. In frustration, a number of political com-munication scholars have turned to the Internetas a promising space for inclusive and enlight-ened civic discourse. Such scholars argue thatmeaningful e-democracy entails e-deliberation:the opening up of the Internet as a popular agorain which positions can be exposed to publicscrutiny and debate, and the force of the morereasoned argument might prevail (Albrecht,2006; Coleman & Gotze, 2001; Dahlberg, 2001;Delborne, Anderson, Kleinman, Mathilde, &Powell, 2011; Graham & Witschge, 2003;Loveland & Popescu, 2011).

But, like the other terms that we have dis-cussed (citizenship, participation, and engage-ment), the concept of deliberation has to be con-structed before it can be applied. The delibera-tive citizen might be imagined as someone whois prepared to be open about her views, willingto spend time hearing and engaging with oppos-ing positions, and prepared to talk relentlessly insearch of compromise and consensus, yet suchan ideal is too vague and idealized to constitute atheory of citizenship. Deliberative scholars, whohave been at the forefront of defining as well asobserving the phenomenon of deliberation, havebeen under some pressure to explain what delib-eration looks like when it occurs. But they arefar from united in arriving at a clear-cut defi-nition. Gonzalez-Bailon et al. (2010) note thatdisagreement among researchers about the nec-essary and sufficient conditions for deliberationto take place makes it almost impossible toidentify deliberative talk when it occurs:

Without these conditions, deliberation is amoving target: it is difficult to match withany particular instance of public discus-sion, and it can always be argued that somecrucial element is missing that disqualifiesthe entire empirical approach. The prob-lem with this lack of conceptual clarityis not only that it goes against the basic

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principle of scientific refutability, hamper-ing the development of the theory, but alsothat it blurs the boundaries between thedefinition of deliberation and its evalua-tion. (p. 3)

Muhlberger (2000) observes that “little agree-ment exists regarding what deliberation is andhow it might be measured” (p. 2). Parkinson(2003) criticizes researchers, such as Buttonand Mattson (1999), for labeling as deliberative“practices which exhibit none of the procedu-ral conditions of genuine deliberation” (p. 181).Gastil and Black (2008) note that “there existvaried theoretical conceptions of public deliber-ation and no clear—let alone widely adopted—conceptual definition of the term,” and pro-ceed to make the rather grand claim that “thestudy of deliberation is not so much a subfieldwithin the larger body of political communica-tion research, but, rather, can serve as a meansof organizing and making sense of the politicalcommunication enterprise, as well as a meansof revealing those spots that the field has over-looked” (p. 1). Neblo (2005) warns that “noamount of conceptual maneuvering will allowthe deliberative democrat to skirt the detailsof how deliberation will actually function inapplied politics” (p. 174). Two things are clear:there exists no scholarly consensus about whateven the most basic characteristics of delibera-tion are, and scholars are leading players in theeffort to construct a meaning that is sufficientlycompelling to relate the notion of deliberativecitizenship to the empirical world around them.

ONLINE DELIBERATION RESEARCH

If, as we argue, deliberative citizenship is aconstruction, it follows that it is best understoodby tracing how specific practices, both socialand technical, have given rise to this particu-lar way of imagining, designing, and evaluatingcitizenship. Top-down government strategiesintended to promote “responsible” citizenshipare central to the shaping of civic behavior. Butmore broadly, as Foucauldian governmentalityscholars have emphasized, other, nonstateagencies and bodies of expertise are alsoimplicated in efforts to shape citizen conduct

through various “technologies of citizenship”(Barnett, 2003, pp. 81–108; Cruikshank, 1999;Dean, 1999). We argue here that online deliber-ation research is involved in cultivating a partic-ular form of deliberative citizenship. Sometimesthe links between deliberative research and prac-tice are direct and explicit. For example, in theirstudy of 58 European and U.S. online policyconsultations, Astrom and Gronlund (in press)observe that “44 percent of the researchers weconsidered had been practically involved in thecases they evaluated. They had been mem-bers of the project teams, planning the con-sultation, developing software and moderatingdebates.” Perhaps not surprisingly, Astrom andGronlund (in press) found that projects thatresearchers were involved in running tended tobe more positively evaluated than those thatwere observed independently. Their conclusionthat “The temptation for researchers examin-ing the use of electronic forums is to jumpinto the struggle over defining what they arereally for and to help forge new uses” (Astromand Gronlund, in press) accords with the find-ings of Macintosh, Coleman, and Schneeberger(2009) in their study of the unstable bound-ary between research and practice in Europeane-participation projects. But the links betweenonline deliberation research and practice mayalso be less direct or explicit. Scholars research-ing online deliberation have also played, weargue, a significant part in constructing theobject that they are studying, insofar as theyhave identified deliberation’s appearance onlineand have generated a body of detailed knowl-edge about the social and technical conditionsunder which it is most likely to be successful.

Most researchers, however, continue to speakand write as if deliberation and the capacitiesit presupposes are naturally occurring and uni-versal rather than constructed and contingent.Holding on to an essentialist conception of lib-eral citizenship, they fail to consider the extentto which the deliberative citizen is “formed andnormed,” in Ivison’s (1997, pp. 24–53) evoca-tive phrase, and to which they contribute to theconstruction of the object of their own research.In arguing that online deliberation researchersare deeply implicated in the construction of whatthey study is not to cast aspersions on their (our)

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integrity or suggest that such constructivism isan intellectual or ethical weakness. On the con-trary, it is by coming to recognize how scholarlyreflection contributes to the enactment of thesocial that we can (as we do in the final sectionof this article) face up to our responsibilities asknowledge producers.

We consider here two related ways in whichresearchers have contributed to the constructionof online deliberation: ontologically, by namingcertain forms of talk as deliberation and othersas either mere chatter or insincere politicking;and socio-technically, by setting out the mostappropriate ways for online deliberation to bemade to happen.

Privileging Certain Forms of Talk

The Internet is replete with talk: billions ofwords, sentences, messages, sentiments. Muchcan be learned from studying how such talk isstructured and the extent to which it influencescivic behavior. But deliberation researchersignore most online talk, regarding it as merechatter—the casual noise of mundane sociabil-ity. Political talk fares rather better. Scholarshave taken great interest in the various waysthat citizens express themselves online, not onlyas potential voters during the heated periodsof election campaigns, but also in day-to-daydiscussions among themselves and with electedofficials about matters of public consequence.For deliberative purists, however, such verbalexchanges rarely meet the standards required for“proper” deliberation. For them, the key fea-tures of deliberative talk, be it online or offline,are procedural and substantive rationality. And,of course, the terms of rationality are them-selves highly constructed, often amounting toa Westernized notion of politeness, fair play,and emotive repression (Min, 2009). By thedemanding standards of deliberative rational-ism, most online discussion, even when it isabout matters conventionally defined as politi-cal, falls short of the ideal norms operationalizedby researchers in their normatively rather narrowcontent analyses (Davis, 1999; Hill & Hughes,1998; Wilhelm, 2000). Online talk is routinelyfound to be uncivil, beset by affectively chargedcontributors and not conducive to the sharing of

arguments and shifting of preferences. Wilhelm(2000), for example, concludes his content anal-ysis of online discussion by noting that, “Thedata support the conception of online politi-cal forums as facilitating self-expression andmonologue, without in large measure the ‘lis-tening,’ responsiveness, and dialogue that wouldpromote communicative action, such as prior-itizing issues, negotiating differences, reachingagreement” (p. 98).

While early researchers, who mainly focusedon nonmoderated newsgroups, failed to finddeliberation online and bemoaned the poor qual-ity of most political talk, it was not long beforesubsequent researchers began to “discover” it.Interestingly, the appearance of online delib-eration tended to coincide with experimentsand pilot projects that were designed to bringit about (Coleman, 2004; Macintosh, Robson,Smith, & Whyte, 2003; Muhlberger, 2006;Price & Cappella, 2002). In short, much of theoptimism about online deliberation emanatedfrom scholars researching spaces of civic talkthat were constructed with a view to promot-ing the very norms that they were lookingfor. Indeed, in several cases, researchers wereinvolved in the design and management ofprojects intended to test the potential for onlinedeliberation. The value of such exercises wasthat researchers were able to explore how par-ticular tools and systems afforded observabledeliberative outcomes. In establishing and scru-tinizing online zones of well-regulated ratio-nal discourse, researchers were able to imaginewhat democratic citizenship might be like if itcould be immunized against the messy incur-sions of everyday life. But findings based onsuch experiments and pilot projects could not begeneralized; there was a sense in which onlinedeliberation was a creature of the laboratory.

The conflation between research and itsobject was compounded by researchers’ nor-mative obsession with rational argumentationmodeled on the Habermasian notion of dis-course ethics, as if that were the only form ofcivic expression that deserved to be consideredas deliberative. Some critics of the delibera-tive turn (Fraser, 1990; Mouffe, 2000; Sanders,1997; Young, 2001, 2002) have argued thatthe straightjacket of rationalistic deliberation

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often serves to marginalize, undermine, and pro-scribe the expressive repertoires of subordinategroups, and act as a normalizing and conser-vative force against progressive social change.Sanders (1997) argues that “Appeals to deliber-ation . . . have often been fraught with conno-tations of rationality, reserve, cautiousness, qui-etude, community, selflessness, and universal-ism, connotations which in fact probably under-mine deliberation’s democratic claims” (p. 347).She goes on to suggest that

The invitation to deliberate has stringsattached. Deliberation is a request for acertain kind of talk: rational, contained,and orientated to a shared problem. Whereantidemocrats have used the standards ofexpertise, moderation, and communal ori-entation as a way to exclude average citi-zens from political decision-making, mod-ern democrats seem to adopt these stan-dards as guides for what democratic pol-itics should be like. And the exclusion-ary connotations of these standards per-sist. Arguing that democratic deliberationshould be rational, moderate, and not self-ish implicitly excludes public talk that isimpassioned, extreme, and the product ofparticular interests. (Sanders, 1997, p. 360)

Following on from this critique, Mouffe (2000)characterizes deliberative purists as beingsomewhat naïvely oblivious to the pervasivenessof social structure:

One of the shortcomings of the delibera-tive approach is that, by postulating theavailability of a public sphere where powerwould have been eliminated and where arational consensus could be realized, thismodel of democratic politics is unable toacknowledge the dimension of antagonismthat the pluralism of values entails andits ineradicable character. . . . In order toremedy this serious deficiency, we need ademocratic model able to grasp the natureof the political. This requires developingan approach which places the question ofpower and antagonism at its very center.(pp. 98–99)

In response to these doubts that have beenraised about the cultural and political assump-tions implicit in normative conceptions of delib-eration, we argue that in some contexts, reason-governed deliberation is unduly restrictive, dis-counting other important ways of making,receiving, and contesting public claims. In par-ticular, we observe a tendency on the part ofsome proponents of the deliberative approach tocivic discourse to celebrate its apolitical charac-ter, privileging the search for consensus abovethe profession of ideological candor and thecontestation of values. Such perspectives are sonormatively committed to a search for univer-sally acceptable agreement that they have cometo regard agonistic vigor as somehow antagonis-tic to the deliberative project. Not only is suchdepoliticized rationalism nothing more than anideological position in itself (as EnlightenmentReason ever was), but it denies in the name ofdeliberative capacity-building some of the fea-tures of democratic citizenship that have provenhistorically to be most strategically advanta-geous to groups engaged in attempts to resist theforces of hegemonic authority.

It follows from this that we need to remainmore open as researchers and practitioners to acatholic range of communicative practices andpossibilities, including those that address nakedpower as well as sweet reason. Content analysesof online discussions that dismiss the expres-sion of anecdotes, sentiments, reminiscences,calls to action, or casual observations as if theywere a devalued currency, incomparable withthe deliberative gold standard of the well-madeargument, references to authoritative data, andappeals to consensus, tell us no more than thatresearchers prefer certain modes of civic talkthan others. They do not tell us which com-plex mix of expressive forms is most likelyto explain antagonistic positions most clearly,inspire collective action, or generate feelings ofsolidarity.

Technologies of Discursive Order

Research on online deliberation has identi-fied various online practices and architectures,including social as well as technical features,that make deliberation more likely to work.

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We refer to these as technologies of discursiveorder. They constitute techniques and strategiesdesigned to produce forms of communicativeinteraction consistent with norms of deliberativequality. Upon investigation, most of the claimssurrounding these techniques and strategies arehighly contested. For example, some researchershave found that anonymity allows for a fluidityof identity so that citizens can present them-selves in varied ways, without feeling judgedor constrained by conventional cultural cues(Bowker & Tuffin, 2003; Kim, 2006). Othersargue that anonymity contributes to a lack ofcivility and respect in online discussion, andthat compelling people to use their real namesencourages them to take responsibility for whatthey say and be more thoughtful when contribut-ing (Friedman et al., 2000; Polat & Pratchett,2009). Crucial for deliberation, knowing who isspeaking also helps other interlocutors to checkfor performative contradictions and the sincer-ity of individual utterances (Habermas, 1989).Several researchers have argued that the tem-poral aspects of discursive practices are highlysignificant. Asynchronous discussions, whereparticipants have more time to reflect and moreflexibility about when to participate, are oftenpresented as being more likely to promote delib-eration than real-time, synchronous interaction(Janssen & Kies, 2005; Smith, John, Sturgis, &Nomura, 2009). Some deliberative sites take thislogic further: The Local Issues Forums run bye-demcoracy.org, for example, limit the num-ber of possible contributions to two per day.Rationing the number of posts prevents a fewvociferous contributors from dominating discus-sions to the exclusion of others. It also encour-ages individuals to reflect more carefully beforeposting and to provide higher-quality contribu-tions to the discussion.

Moderation practices can have a significantpositive impact on the deliberative quality ofdiscussion, whether it is in the form of pre-moderation (where contributions are screenedand some contributions are prohibited fromreaching users) or post-moderation (the removalof posts after they have been posted). Onlinelibertarians view moderation as an illegitimateform of censorship, which conflicts with the

unrestricted expression that characterizes theInternet at its best. Other researchers, by con-trast, have pointed to the important role thatskilled individuals can play as moderators inpromoting deliberation (Coleman & Gotze,2001; Edwards, 2002; Wright, 2009; Wright &Street, 2007). In this view, moderators can helpto maintain civility by warning participants ofinfractions of a site’s rules of discussion, byremoving offending posts, and by temporarilyblocking repeat offenders from participating.The moderator also plays a broader role in facil-itating deliberation, acting as a “helper” and“facilitator,” not just a “filter”: they can recruitnew participants to join deliberation, introducenew topics, encourage alternate viewpoints, andrespond to participants’ questions and com-plaints (Edwards, 2002). As such, moderatorsmay be viewed as important “democratic inter-mediaries,” in Edwards’s (2002) terms, whichpromote and enhance the deliberative quality ofdiscussion.

As well as formal design features such asthese, the discursive and visual elements thatsurround particular online settings and prac-tices also play a significant role in commu-nicating their meaning and purpose to users.Various semiotic and discursive elements, fromthe names of particular sites to the visual imagesthat are used, help to “encode” and attach a “pre-ferred reading” and meaning to a practice thatusers “decode” (Hall, 1980). They can help, inWoolgar’s (1991) words, to “configure” a par-ticular form of use of the technology. For exam-ple, they can encourage participants to adoptforms of civility and perhaps even restraint thatare consistent with dominant understandings ofdeliberation.

By pointing to these and other features ofonline settings and practices, research on onlinedeliberation has demonstrated how, under the“right” conditions, deliberative discussion, asunderstood by scholars, can be promoted online.While some critics have questioned the feasibil-ity of deliberation, defending more limited and“realistic” notions of citizens’ participation inpublic life (Chadwick, 2009), online delibera-tion researchers have in recent years been ableto point to successful examples of deliberative

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citizenship, as they understand it, and havebeen able to identify cases where onlinediscussions have led to the positive effectspredicted by deliberative theory: Discussionshave widened participants’ repertoire of argu-ments, introduced them to new perspectives,and led to shifts in preferences (Barabas,2004; Coleman & Blumler, 2009; Janssen &Kies, 2005; Luskin, Fishkin, & Iyengar, 2003;Min, 2007; Monnoyer-Smith, 2006; Price &Cappella, 2002; Shane, 2004).

Current researchers in the field of onlinedeliberation are seeking to build on this workby establishing online practices that are evenmore amenable to reason-governed deliberation.Some of the most inventive work is in the areaof argument mapping and visualization. A com-mon problem in large-scale discussions is cogni-tive overload, with important arguments gettinglost amid a mass of indecipherable noise. In thelight of this, online deliberation researchers andpractitioners have experimented with the use ofmaps that can visualize the logic of the variouspositions and arguments within a deliberativeexchange. These maps make it supposedly eas-ier for interlocutors to understand and charttheir way through large and complex public dis-cussions (Buckingham-Shum, 2006; IMPACTProject, 2011; Renton & Macintosh, 2007).Visualization techniques are not limited to rep-resenting public discussions empirically. Theyalso aim to increase the rationality of discussionby identifying and making explicit the premises,warrants, and validity claims behind differentarguments. Reason can then be separated fromother extraneous features of discussion: fromrhetorical, expressive, and emotional appeals;from the status of the speaker who is makingan argument; or from the number of people whohappen to support a particular proposal. Theaim is to encourage reflection and ensure thatthe “authority of the better argument” prevails(Habermas, 1991, p. 36). As Hoffmann (2008)suggests, argument maps and visualizations aremore than mere “representations”; they shouldbe understood, he argues, as tools that “aug-ment our natural abilities” and seek to stimulateour reasoning by challenging and compellingus to think deliberatively. By representing thelogic of the better argument to us, argument

visualization has a normative binding force: “Weas the users of an argumentation system haveto accept the normative character of its rulesas something that is beyond our own power”(Hoffmann, 2008, p. 199).

While these technologies of discursive order-ing do not determine subjectivity, they do seekto “elicit, promote, facilitate and attribute var-ious capacities, qualities and statuses to par-ticular agents” (Dean, 1999, p. 32). Users, asHoffmann (2008) implies above, must acceptthe practices of citizenship to which they aresubject. By naming and identifying online delib-eration’s appearance and by generating evermore detailed knowledge about the social andtechnical practices and conditions under whichit is most likely to succeed, online deliberationresearch has contributed to the enactment of aparticular mode of citizenship in which peopleare prepared to submit to transparent and uni-versal rationality. From this perspective, onlinedeliberation research is not separate from itsobject of study, but is implicated in its con-struction, helping to create what it purportsmerely to discover (Law & Urry, 2004). As such,we might say that online deliberation involveswhat Mol (1998) calls “ontological politics”: Itinvolves making crucial decisions about whichtype of reality to recognize and promote, evenif researchers typically deny this fact by contin-uing to assert mistakenly that deliberation is anatural and universal phenomenon rather than aconstructed one.

The Ontological Politics of OnlineDeliberation Research

In arguing that the concept of online deliber-ation is not only contingent and contested, butinevitably constructed by those who facilitateand evaluate it, we are not seeking to suggestthat by eschewing constructivism, researcherscan gain privileged access to some less made-up and more authentic conception of civicdiscourse. In recent times, social scientistshave turned their attention to the foundationalproblematics of ontological politics, acknowl-edging the extent to which the object of theirresearch is a product of their attempts to describewhat is at stake. As Hay (2006) has noted,

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Political scientists, for the most part,have tended to leave ontological issues tophilosophers and to those social scientistsless encumbered by substantive empiricalconcerns. Yet as the discipline has becomemore reflexive and perhaps rather less con-fident than once it was at the ease withwhich it might claim a scientific license forthe knowledge it generates, so ontologicalissues have increasingly come to the fore.(p. 78)

The ontological status of public online delibera-tion is inseparable from the politics of determin-ing who can speak for the public, what can besaid in public, and what constitutes the publicinterest. As Ryfe (2007) has rightly put it,

When advocates of deliberation press tomake public life more deliberative, theycompete with others to set the “legitimatesocial vision” on the basis of which pub-lic life will be organized; they competeto name, classify, organize, and authorizepublic life. This work represents a politicsof the most basic sort. (p. 8)

In the absence of metaphysical certainties, theaim of researchers should be to engage in criticalreflection about the genealogies, meanings, andconsequences of different discourses and prac-tices of citizenship; to ask how best we mightevaluate the particular constructions of delib-erative citizenship that are enacted in onlinedeliberation research and practice. Put morestarkly, we might ask, if citizenship is a con-struction, what forms of citizenship should we,as researchers, be helping to enact? In setting outour own responses to that question, with a viewto stimulating debate within the growing onlinedeliberation research community and beyond,we are not seeking to impose a new normativeframework, but to make explicit (and thereforeaccountable and debatable) what is too oftenonly implicitly acknowledged by researchers.

A first response to the question of whatforms of citizenship researchers should enactis to acknowledge that, while citizenship isalways already a construction, not all pro-cesses of citizen formation are consistent with

norms of democratic autonomy. Crucially, asOlson (2008) has argued, some processes ofsubject formation produce citizens with capac-ities of reflexivity and agency that enable themto influence and potentially contest the forcesto which they are subject. Such citizens, heargues, “would be more able to alter the rangeof practices and life possibilities they them-selves are allowed” and be “more able toparticipate in choosing the circumstances oftheir own self-government and freedom” (Olson,2008, p. 51). Citizen reflexivity and agencyare not only significant considerations in thedesign and organization of online communica-tive practices. They are important in thinkingabout how to design and conduct research. Mostresearchers of online deliberation have optedto use content analysis as a means of mea-suring the quality of discussion, operational-izing their own conceptions of what “good”communication looks like. Researchers haverarely given any significant role to citizens’ ownreflections upon, and evaluations of, the qual-ity and experience of online communication;this tends to be true of political science andpolitical communication more generally, withtheir fondness for survey research and rationalis-tic modeling (Markham & Couldry, 2007). Thedominant methods used in online deliberationresearch have tended to reproduce an inert andmute research subject. Using different methods,such as focus groups, interviews, or researchdiaries, we might be able to pay more attentionin our research to the perceptions and reflec-tions of participants themselves—to how theyexperience and evaluate the practices of citi-zen formation to which they are made subject.Renegotiating the established power relation-ship between expert researchers and the subjectsof their research, the perceptions and reflectionsof research participants could then be used toinform the direction and shape of the researchprocess itself.

Second, we propose that researchers shouldaim to align our research with the less power-ful and not contribute to reproducing the powerof the already dominant (Law & Urry, 2004).Deliberative reasoning and publicity can help todiscipline elites, encouraging those who usuallydominate to account for themselves in public

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and to listen to the perspectives of others. Elster(1998) refers here to the “civilizing force ofhypocrisy,” where publicity is able to encour-age speakers to “replace the language of interestby the language of reason and to replace impar-tial motives by passionate ones” (p. 111). At thesame time, as we have already noted, overly for-malized conceptions of deliberation can serveto subordinate individuals and groups by dis-missing as “non-deliberative” modes of expres-sion, forms of position-stating, and demonstra-tions of affect. Many of these exclusionaryand marginalizing practices are ethnocentric andgendered; most of them embody codes of classand status that work insidiously to filter outvoices deemed to be vulgar, threatening, overde-pendent, or unruly. Few researchers wouldknowingly support such norms on inequality,but spotting, describing, and challenging themis not always easy. Here again, there are implica-tions for research methodology: Perhaps, whenit comes to analyzing deliberative quality, themore nuanced approach of discourse analysiswould be better at identifying hesitations, put-downs, failures to be understood, or switchesof communicative repertoire than the crudercounting mechanism of content analysis; per-haps, when it comes to evaluating practicesof online moderation and facilitation, attentionshould be paid to who is not addressed, whatis not said, and how rules might have beendifferently interpreted, rather than merely moni-toring the catechistic principles of Habermasiandiscourse ethics.

As well as endeavoring to acknowledge andencourage voices that are too often unheardin formal deliberative situations, there maybe much to be learned by researchers fromseeking out spaces of unconventional politicaltalk. In diverse modes and arenas of infor-mal online communication, people exchangeopinions, stories, jokes, gossip, and desires,and these can sometimes assume a deliberativecharacter, because attempts by people to per-suade one another of the rightness of theirpreferences and values goes on all the time,interspersed among much else that is casual andmundane. Beyond the political bubble withinwhich most policy formation, decision-making,and formally structured deliberation take place,

there exists a rich vein of public discussion fromwhich researchers can gain an insight into whatwe might call street-level deliberation.

Third, we argue that online deliberationresearchers need to become more attendant tooutcomes—not simply in terms of whether par-ticipants trusted the process, learned anythingnew, or would do it all again, but in terms ofthe political efficacy of citizens and of policyoutputs. As Bang and Esmark (2009) has sug-gested, new modes of governance have placedgreat emphasis on the democratization of citizeninput, but without outputs, no form of collec-tive action, including talk, amounts to much.While some policy scholars have written aboutthe effects of interactive civic discourse on pol-icy (mainly the lack of it, it should be said),for most online deliberation researchers it seemsas if the political process ends when civic talkstops. Online deliberation is not an alternativeto political decision-making, but a means ofenhancing it. And, in representative democra-cies, deliberation by the public or even electedparliamentarians is but one stage in the com-plex process of turning organized preferencesinto implementable policies. We know verylittle at the moment about how online delib-erative talk relates in practice to institutionaldecision-making. Methodologically, investigat-ing this would require researchers to becomeengaged with subjects being deliberated, and theways in which they are structurally, politically,and linguistically inscribed, before turning to theways in which citizens reflect upon them. Just asargument mapping and visualization (discussedabove) are intended to summarize the rangeof positions within a deliberative exchange,there is a need for a broader mapping of theinstitutionally embedded processes (includingthose entrenched within global, national, andlocal markets and their institutional offshoots)through which online deliberative talk must res-onate if it is to become more than a politi-cal distraction and to increase the efficacy ofcitizens.

The study of online deliberation is still inits infancy. Much has been learned over morethan a decade, during which the Internet hasgrown from being a minority tool to a sociallypervasive presence and deliberative theory has

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moved out of the rarefied environment of thedepartments of philosophy to influential depart-ments of governments and grass-roots applica-tions. Much has been learned, but much has beenshaped at the same time, and often by the sameresearchers. We have been complicit in fashion-ing the object of our attention. Now might be agood time to reflect upon exactly what we havebeen trying to design.

THIS SPECIAL ISSUE

Between June 30 and July 2, 2010 the fourthInternational Conference on Online Deliberation(OD2010) was hosted by the Centre for DigitalCitizenship, which is based in the Institute ofCommunications Studies at the University ofLeeds, UK. The keynote speakers were RichardAllan, Head of Public Affairs for FacebookEurope, and Beth Noveck, Director of the WhiteHouse Open Government Initiative. The con-ference brought together online deliberationresearchers and practitioners from Europe, theUnited States, and Australia. It was followed bya call to participants to contribute articles to thisspecial issue. Some of the papers published herewere first presented at OD2010; others comefrom the many responses to our call for papers.The contributions to this special issue representsome of the latest thinking and research ononline deliberation. They pick up on the themesdiscussed in this introductory article, while alsoraising additional issues and taking their owndistinctive approaches.

The first contribution, by Dhanaraj Thakur,focuses on online policy discussions by civilsociety groups in the Caribbean. Thakur exam-ines how diversity among participants affectsdeliberation and finds a positive correla-tion between plurality and reasoned argument.Following previous studies, he uses contentanalysis to measure deliberation empirically.But he also stresses the need to understandthe perspectives of participants themselves anddraws upon interviews with users to supplementhis analysis.

Todd Graham’s article takes the study ofdeliberation to a more unconventional andless obviously political space: an online forum

dedicated to a reality television program inthe UK. His analysis confirms the importanceof looking for political talk in a range ofsites, beyond those specifically labeled as politi-cal or policy-related. He also demonstrates thevalue of moving beyond formal conceptionsof deliberation and adopting a more flexiblenotion of political talk that includes expressivespeech acts as well as more typical elements ofdeliberation.

In their contribution, Rean van der Merweand Anthony Meehan also seek to broaden ourconception of online deliberation. Conductingan in-depth case study of online deliberation ina local community in South Africa, they analyzevarious patterns of “governance conversation”and the instrumental and expressive interac-tions they involve. They conclude by arguingthat online deliberation might be especially wellsuited to facilitating the type of pluralist delib-erations required to deal with complex localgovernance problems.

Martin Karlsson’s article studies 28 onlineforums initiated by the European Commissionand seeks to explain variations in the leveland intensity of online discussion. He sug-gests that online political discussions are moreintense in forums where the degree of con-sensus among participants is low. In contrastto previous research, he defends a more actor-centered approach to online deliberation, basedon understanding the strategies and calculationsof the participants involved in deliberation.

Jennifer Stromer-Galley, Nick Webb, andPeter Muhlberger’s article describes an innova-tive government-funded project in the UnitedStates intended to promote public deliberationonline and connect it with policy-making. Theirbehind-the-scenes account of the challenges theproject faces sheds light on some common dif-ficulties encountered by researchers and practi-tioners in the field, especially in dealing withpolitical and bureaucratic resistance to publicdeliberation processes.

Finally, W. Ben Towne and James D.Herbsleb’s article provides a comprehensivesurvey of the different technologies that haverecently been developed and used to supportonline deliberation. Based on a broad reviewof literature, they isolate a range of important

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design principles that can be used to improve theusability of deliberative systems and increasethe quality of online deliberation.

We hope that this special issue raises enoughnew questions to expand the online delibera-tion research agenda, and, perhaps most impor-tantly, to remind scholars working in this areaof the critical role that they play in constructingwhat sometimes appears to us as an independentobject of study.

Stephen Coleman and Giles MossThe Institute of Communications Studies,

University of Leeds

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