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Measuring Online Political Dialogue: Does Polarization Trigger More Deliberation?

Author

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  • Ignacio-Jesús Serrano-Contreras

    (Department of Political Science, University of Granada, Spain)

  • Javier García-Marín

    (Department of Political Science, University of Granada, Spain)

  • Óscar G. Luengo

    (Department of Political Science, University of Granada, Spain)

Abstract

In recent years, we have witnessed an increasing consolidation of different realms where citizens can deliberate and discuss a variety of topics of general interest, including politics. The comments on news posts in online media are a good example. The first theoretical contributions called attention to the potential of those spaces to build a healthy (civic and participatory) public sphere, going much deeper in the process of political dialogue and deliberation (Fung, Gilman, & Shkabatur, 2013; Lilleker & Jackson, 2008; O’Reilly, 2005; Stromer-Galley & Wichowski, 2011). Polarization has been configured as a constant feature of the quality of the mentioned dialogues, particularly in Mediterranean countries (polarized pluralists’ cases). One of the research challenges at the moment has to do with the scrutiny of polarization within the political deliberation provoked by news stories. The goal of this article is the analysis of political dialogue from the perspective of the polarization in the increasingly popular network YouTube, which is presenting very particular characteristics. Using a sample of almost 400,000 posted comments about diverse topics (climate change, the Catalonian crisis, and Political parties’ electoral ads) we propose an automated method in order to measure polarization. Our hypothesis is that the number of comments (quantitative variable) is positively related to their polarization (qualitative variable). We will also include in the examination information about the ideological editorial line of newspapers, the type of topic under discussion, the amount of traceable dialogue, etc. We propose an index to (1) measure the polarization of each comment and use it to show how this value has behaved over time; and (2) verify the hypothesis using the average polarization of comments for each video.

Suggested Citation

  • Ignacio-Jesús Serrano-Contreras & Javier García-Marín & Óscar G. Luengo, 2020. "Measuring Online Political Dialogue: Does Polarization Trigger More Deliberation?," Media and Communication, Cogitatio Press, vol. 8(4), pages 63-72.
    • Handle: RePEc:cog:meanco:v:8:y:2020:i:4:p:63-72
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Bernhardt, Dan & Krasa, Stefan & Polborn, Mattias, 2008. "Political polarization and the electoral effects of media bias," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 92(5-6), pages 1092-1104, June.
    2. Christopher A. Bail & Lisa P. Argyle & Taylor W. Brown & John P. Bumpus & Haohan Chen & M. B. Fallin Hunzaker & Jaemin Lee & Marcus Mann & Friedolin Merhout & Alexander Volfovsky, 2018. "Exposure to opposing views on social media can increase political polarization," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 115(37), pages 9216-9221, September.
    3. Matthew Gentzkow & Jesse Shapiro & Matt Taddy, 2016. "Measuring Polarization in High-Dimensional Data: Method and Application to Congressional Speech," Working Papers id:11114, eSocialSciences.
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    Cited by:

    1. Renáta Németh, 2023. "A scoping review on the use of natural language processing in research on political polarization: trends and research prospects," Journal of Computational Social Science, Springer, vol. 6(1), pages 289-313, April.
    2. Emiliana De Blasio & Marianne Kneuer & Wolf Schünemann & Michele Sorice, 2020. "The Ongoing Transformation of the Digital Public Sphere: Basic Considerations on a Moving Target," Media and Communication, Cogitatio Press, vol. 8(4), pages 1-5.

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