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Following Hovland’s persuasion theory, this paper aims to develop a conceptual model and analyzes characteristics of online political deliberation behavior from three aspects (i.e. information, situation and manager). Based on the whole interactive process of online political deliberation, this paper aims to reveal the key points that affect the response effect of the government from the persuasive perspective of online political consultation.

Based on more than 40,000 netizens’ posts and government responses from 2011 to the first half of 2019 of the Chinese political platform, this paper used the text analysis and machine learning methods to extract measurement variables of online political deliberation characteristics and the econometrics analysis method to conduct empirical research.

The results showed that the textual information, political environment and identity of the political objects affect the effectiveness of government response. Furthermore, for different position categories of political officials, the length of political texts, topic categories and emotional tendencies have different effects on the response effectiveness. Additionally, the effect of political time on the effectiveness of response differs.

The findings will help ascertain the characteristics of online political deliberation behavior that affect how effective government response is and provide a theoretical basis for why the public should express their political concerns.

This study aimed to uncover the characteristics of both misinformation and refutations as well as the associations between different aspects of misinformation and corresponding ways of rebutting it.

Leveraging Hovland's persuasion theory as a research lens and taking data from two Chinese refutation platforms, we characterized the topics of COVID-19-related misinformation and refutations, misinformation communicator, persuasion strategies of misinformation, refutation communicators and refutation strategies based on content analysis. Then, logistic regressions were undertaken to examine how the characteristics of misinformation and refutation strategies interacted.

The investigation into the association between misinformation and refutations found that distinct refutation strategies are favored when debunking particular types of misinformation and by various kinds of refutation communicators. In addition, several patterns of persuasion strategies were identified.

This study had theoretical and practical implications. It emphasized how misinformation and refutations interacted from the perspective of Hovland's persuasion theory, extending the scope of the existing literature and expanding the classical theory to a new research scenario. In addition, several patterns of persuasion strategies used in misinformation and refutation were detected, which may contribute to the refutation practice and help people become immune to misinformation.

This research is among the first to analyze the relationships between misinformation and refutation strategies. Second, we investigated the persuasion strategies of misinformation and refutations, contributing to the concerning literature. Third, elaborating on Hovland’s persuasion theory, this study proposed a comprehensive framework for analyzing the misinformation and refutations in China during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Political polarization and incivility manifested itself online throughout the 2016 US presidential election. The purpose of this paper is to understand how features of social media platforms (e.g. reacting, sharing) impacted the online public sphere during the 2016 election.

After conducting in-depth interviews with politically interested young people and applying deductive coding procedures to transcripts of the interviews, Dahlberg’s (2004) six normative conditions for the public sphere were used to empirically examine this interview data.

While some participants described strategies for productive political discussion on Social Networking Sites (SNS) and a willingness to use them to discuss politics, many users’ experiences largely fall short of Dahlberg’s (2004) normative criteria for the public sphere.

The period in which these interviews were conducted in could have contributed to a more pessimistic view of political discussion in general.

Scholars and the public should recognize that the affordances of SNS for political discussion are not distributed evenly between different platforms, both for the sake of empirical studies of SNS moving forward and the state of democratic deliberation.

Although previous research has examined online and SNS-based political discussion as it relates to the public sphere, few attempts have been made understand how specific communicative practices or platform-specific features of SNS have contributed to or detracted from a healthy public sphere.

This chapter provides an overview of the history of deliberative theory and practice, starting with an early focus on rational consensus models and moving toward contemporary treatments of deliberation in pluralistic, contentious systems consisting of multiple, overlapping, and at times adversarial stakeholder groups. It summarizes major theories related to analytic and social/relational aspects of deliberation, communication across differences, and design and facilitation processes. Finally, it reviews group communication research on deliberative processes and outcomes, notes key critiques of deliberative theory, and explores future directions for group deliberation research and practice.

This study examined how likeminded Facebook comments with incivility and without supporting evidence influence readers' evaluations of the commenter and online political participation intention. This study also investigated whether the indirect effect of exposure to uncivil comments and comments without evidence on online political participation through evaluations of the commenters is contingent on the strength of partisanship.

The study used a 2 (uncivil comments vs civil comments) × 2 (comments without supporting evidence vs comments with supporting evidence) factorial design with a scenario about reading similar viewpoints about the gun control issue in Facebook comments.

The results showed that compared to exposure to civil agreeing comments, exposure to uncivil likeminded comments resulted in higher levels of negative evaluations of the commenters, which in turn decreased willingness to participate in political activities online. Exposure to comments without evidence led to more negative evaluations of the commenters, but it did not significantly influence online political participation. In addition, the strength of partisanship did not significantly moderate the indirect effect of exposure to uncivil comments and comments without evidence on online political participation through evaluations of the commenters.

Although previous studies have demonstrated the significant effects of incivility and reasoned argument, little is known about whether and how people evaluate ingroup members' comments that are uncivil and lacking reasoned arguments. Most of these studies have examined incivility in political contexts, but few have extended the context to the effect of likeminded comments, especially when the comments are uncivil and lack supporting evidence. The current study aims to fill this gap in the literature.

The purpose of this paper is to examine participation in online social platforms consisting of information exchange, social network interactions, and political deliberation. Despite the proven benefits of online participation, the majority of internet users read social media data but do not directly contribute, a phenomenon called lurking.

A survey was administered electronically to 507 participants and consisted of ten sections in a questionnaire to gather data on the relationship between online participation and the following variables: anonymity, social value orientation, motivations, and participation in offline activities, as well as the internet’s political influence and personality traits.

Findings show that users with high levels of participation also identify themselves, report higher levels of extroversion, openness, and activity outside the internet, the motivations being an intermediary variable in the relationship between the variables value.

The study shows that participation in online social platforms is not only related to personality traits, but they are impacted by the nature of the motivations that drive them to participate in the particular social platform, as well as by the interest toward the specific topic, or the type or nature of the social group with whom they are communicating.

The use of information and communication technologies to provide citizens with the opportunity to give the government their feedback on the rules currently under development is termed as e-rulemaking. Forums – as the main technological tool used for this – has shown many shortcomings and cannot satisfy all the demands of e-rulemaking. Because social networking sites have shown a political impact on ground, they also might have the ability to remedy these shortcomings. This study aims to investigate the possibility of the use of social networking sites in e-rulemaking.

This research reviews democratic deliberation theory and e-rulemaking in relation with social networks that are used to develop a proposed conceptual model. A combination of qualitative and quantitative research approaches were used to test the proposed model. Semi-structured interviews for mangers and surveys for citizens were used for data collection and then analyzed to draw empirical conclusions.

Certain variable were found to have a statistically significant impact on the dependent variable of this study. The variables include information collection, user interface, privacy, security and use of emoticons in communications. Through this, the research provides an understanding of the variables that significantly and insignificantly affect the use of social networking sites in e-rulemaking.

This research contributes with a conceptual model that outlines the influence of different variables on e-rulemaking as well as an understanding of how social networking sites could be used to improve e-rulemaking practices and citizen inclusion.

Whereas prior research has conceptualized and empirically investigated reinforcement and amplification mechanisms, this paper aims to propose a framework of power that captures the dynamic ways in which different forms of online political action are structured by disparate mechanisms.

The paper derives a theoretical model of power from Foucault and affiliated governmentality studies, which constructs power as the mechanisms and logics that structure the field of possible actions. This model is grounded in research literature on e-democracy and applied in a study of the mechanisms that structure e-democracy.

The paper identifies four mechanisms that balance disparate concerns of e-democracy. Monitoring (M) mechanisms apply logics of security and service to weigh anonymity and publicity against each other. The range of participants is determined by Inclusion/exclusion (I) mechanisms which operate through rules of engagement. Moderation (M) mechanisms balance concerns for heterogenic viewpoints and homogeneity according to a logic of uniformity. Logics of profit-making and shared understanding warrant the balance that Exposure (E) mechanisms strike between information abundance and centralized access. The four mechanisms are combined in the MIME framework.

The MIME framework includes mechanisms that are documented by the English-speaking research community, often with a substantial time lag. Others and potentially forceful mechanisms might not be reported in the research literature.

Practitioners are encouraged to be cognizant of the variety of mechanisms that condition e-democracy; their internal components and external relations of e-democratic practices when designing, building and conducting e-democratic initiatives.

Instead of focusing exclusively on the beneficiaries and the possible payoffs from e-democratic practices, the MIME framework developed in the paper focuses on the mechanisms which structure e-democracy.

A significant issue in jury research has been the use of individual jurors to analyse jury decision‐making. This paper aimed to examine the applicability of computer‐mediated communication to a mock jury deliberation study.

Groups of three to five Australian residents anonymously attended a secure chat room and participated in a semi‐structured discussion about a simulated child sexual assault scenario. Deliberation transcripts were analysed thematically using NVivo. A hermeneutic framework was used to analyse the deliberation transcripts.

Five interrelated themes were revealed, each reflecting the tools online juries used to communicate, create meaning, and arrive at a verdict. Electronic jury deliberation promoted an understanding of how people make sense of child sexual assault cases in Australia today.

This study advanced the understanding of online decision making in a child sexual assault scenario. It demonstrated that knowledge of how juries deliberate and create meaning could improve our understanding of how verdicts are achieved. Electronic mock juries are a valuable adjunct to traditional jury deliberation studies because they are cost effective, time efficient, and offer wider recruitment opportunities.