Online deliberation: state of the art

In the last decade, the issue of online deliberation (or web-deliberation) has gained an important visibility among the scholars in the domain of political science, political philosophy, political communication as well as software designers. It corresponds not only to a topic of analysis – that can be broadly defined as the quantitative and qualitative assessment of the political and public debates online - but also to a democratic model of e-democracy, that aims to shape the different political usage of the web according to the deliberative values. A pertinent way to analyze this broad phenomenon is to subdivide its analysis in three sections which content is partly based on updated findings of my book Promises and Limits of web-deliberation. The first section refers to the deliberative theory on which the empirical research is based. The second section deals with the complex issue of operationalizing the deliberative theory. The last section provides an overview of the online deliberative empirical studies that were conducted this last decade by distinguishing three broad research fields: i) The studies that aim at measuring the usage of the political web-debates and the characteristics of the users; ii) The studies that identify and compare the social and political actors that offer possibilities of online debates; iii) The studies assessing the quality of deliberation in different discursive online settings and the ones aiming at defining the factors that could explain variations in web-deliberation.