The Challenges for Online Deliberation Research: A Literature Review

Method

To conduct this structured literature review, citation analysis was applied to find the most relevant and important studies in the field. A main problem, however, with this method is the semantic fragmentation of the concept of online deliberation, and since a “literature review is concept-centric” (Webster & Watson, 2002), there is a necessity to be modest and honest about the problem with stringency in the reviewed material. To solve this problem, we applied an inductive approach to the semantic varieties of the concept, i.e. we added terms along the way as we found other terms related to the main concept, and then searched these new terms in the same manner as the original term. The different terms that were found in the literature were computer-mediated deliberation (Gastil, 2000), digital deliberation (Bierle, 2004), E-deliberation (Cindio, 2008; Hands, 2005; Kim, 2006), eDeliberation (Wojcik, 2007), virtual deliberation (Barabas, 2003; Delborne et al., 2011) and web-deliberation (Kies, 2010). Our interpretation is that there is no specific normative meaning or substance to these different concepts, but that they are simply semantically different from each other. Departing from these findings, we used online deliberation^†2 as the head term, and then added: Internet deliberation^‡, e-deliberation^‡, eDeliberation^‡, web deliberation^‡, digital deliberation^‡, online political deliberation^‡, on-line deliberation^‡, computer-mediated deliberation^‡, and computer-mediated political discussion^‡.