Common ground is vital for developing deliberative democracy. The current study employs text mining techniques to measure common ground in online political discussions and examines how the structure of political discussions coevolves with common ground over time. The present study collected 175,960 messages over a period of 13 months, from a popular discussion forum on 2012 U.S. presidential election. Common ground is measured by a semantic similarity network and an interpretive framework network. The former emphasizes shared political knowledge, while the latter emphasizes shared interpretations. In addition, this study explores the coevolutionary process of political discussion and common ground. Results were obtained by employing longitudinal network analysis. They suggest that political discussions could facilitate the achievement of common ground that might further serve as a facilitator of political discussion among the participants.
BudgeI. (1996). The new challenge of direct democracy. Oxford, England: Blackwell.
4.
CohenJ. (1989). Deliberation and democratic legitimacy. In HamlinA.PettitP. (Eds.), The good polity: Normative analysis of the state. (pp. 17–34). Oxford, England: Blackwell.
5.
ColemanS.GotzeJ. (2001). Bowling together: Online public engagement in policy deliberation. London, England: Hansard Society.
6.
CollinsA. M.LoftusE. F. (1975). A spreading-activation theory of semantic processing. Psychological Review, 82, 407–428. doi:10.1037//0033-295x.82.6.407
7.
CorradoA.FirestoneC. M. (Eds.). (1996). Elections in cyberspace: Toward a new era in American politics. Washington, DC: Aspen Institute.
8.
DahlR. (1989). Demokration och dess antagonister. New Haven, CT: Yale University.
9.
DiMaggioP.HargittaiE.NeumanW. R.RobinsonJ. P. (2001). Social implications of the Internet. Annual Review of Sociology, 27, 307–336. doi:10.1146/annurev.soc.27.1.307
10.
EllwardtL.SteglichC.WittekR. (2012). The co-evolution of gossip and friendship in workplace social networks. Social Networks, 34, 623–633. doi:10.1016/j.socnet.2012.07.002
11.
EvelandW. P.HivelyM. H. (2009). Political discussion frequency, network size, and “heterogeneity” of discussion as predictors of political knowledge and participation. Journal of Communication, 59, 205–224. doi:10.1111/j.1460-2466.2009.01412.x
12.
EvelandW. P.MartonK.SeoM. (2004). Moving beyond “just the facts”: The influence of online news on the content and structure of public affairs knowledge. Communication Research, 31, 82–108. doi:10.1177/0093650203260203
13.
FiorinaM. P.AbramsS. J.PopeJ. C. (2005). Culture war? The myth of a polarized America. New York, NY: Pearson Longman.
14.
FishbeinM. (1980). A theory of reasoned action: Some applications and implications. In HoweH. E.PageM. M. (Eds.), Nebraska symposium on motivation, 1979 (Vol. 27, pp. 65–116). Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.
15.
FiskeS. T.KinderD. R.LarterW. M. (1983). The novice and the expert: Knowledge-based strategies in political cognition. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 19, 381–400. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0022-1031(83)90029-X
16.
GastilJ. (2008). Political communication and deliberation. Los Angeles, CA: Sage.
17.
GoodinR. (2003). Reflective democracy. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
18.
GraberD. A. (2001). Processing politics: Learning from television in the Internet age. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
19.
HabermasJ. (1962). The structural transformation of the public sphere: An inquiry into a category of a bourgeois society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
20.
HardinC. D.HigginsE. T. (1996). Shared reality: How social verification makes the subjective objective. In HigginsE. T.SorrentinoR. M. (Eds.), Handbook of motivation and cognition: The interpersonal context (Vol. 3, pp. 28–84). New York, NY: Guilford Press.
21.
HaubenM.HaubenR. (1997). Netizens. London, England: Wiley/IEEE Computer Society Press.
22.
HimelboimI. (2011). Civil society and online political discourse: The network structure of unrestricted discussions. Communication Research, 38, 634–659. doi:10.1177/0093650210384853
JostJ. T.LedgerwoodA.HardinC. D. (2008). Shared reality, system justification, and the relational basis of ideological beliefs. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 2, 171–186. doi:10.1111/j.1751-9004.2007.00056.x
25.
KavanaughA.IsenhourP.CooperM.CarrollJ.RossonM. B.SchmitzJ. (2005). Information technology in support of public deliberation. In van den BessalaarP.de MichelisG.PreeceJ.SimoneC. (Eds.), Communities and technologies II (pp. 19–40). Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
26.
KimJ.KimE. J. (2008). Theorizing dialogic deliberation: Everyday political talk as communicative action and dialogue. Communication Theory, 18, 51–70. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2885.2007.00313.x
27.
KuklinskiJ. H.LuskinR. C.BollandJ. (1991). Where is the schema? Going beyond the “s” word in political psychology. American Political Science Review, 85, 1341–1355.
28.
LevineP.FungA.GastilJ. (2005). Future directions for public deliberation. Journal of Public Deliberation, 1, 1–13.
29.
MansbridgeJ.Hartz-KarpJ.AmengualM.GastilJ. (2006). Norms of deliberation: An inductive study. Journal of Public Deliberation, 2, 7.
30.
McGrawK. M.PinneyN. (1990). The effects of general and domain-specific expertise on political memory and judgment. Social Cognition, 8, 9–30. doi:10.1521/soco.1990.8.1.9
31.
MossbergerK.TolbertsC. J. (2010). Digital democracy: How politics online is changing electoral participation. In LeighleyJ. (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of American elections and political behavior. (pp 200–218). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
32.
NeumanW. R. (1981). Differentiation and integration: Two dimensions of political thinking. American Journal of Sociology, 86, 1236–1268.
33.
NeumanW. R.JustM. R.CriglerA. N. (1992). Common knowledge: News and the construction of political meaning. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
34.
NewmanM. E. J. (2006). Modularity and community structure in networks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 103, 8577–8582. doi:10.1073/pnas.0601602103
35.
PapacharissiZ. (2002). The virtual sphere: The internet as a public sphere. New Media & Society, 4, 9–27.
36.
PolatR. K. (2005). The Internet and political participation: Exploring the explanatory links. European Journal of Communication, 20, 435–459. doi:10.1177/0267323105058251
37.
RheingoldH. (1993). The virtual community: Homesteading on the electronic frontier. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
38.
SaltonG.WongA.YangC. S. (1975). A vector space model for automatic indexing. Communications of the ACM, 18, 613.
39.
SnijdersT. A. B.LomiA.TorloV. J. (2012). A model for the multiplex dynamics of two-mode and one-mode networks, with an application to employment preference, friendship, and advice. Social Networks, 35, 265–276. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.socnet.2012.05.005
40.
SnijdersT. A. B.van de BuntG. G.SteglichC. E. G. (2010). Introduction to stochastic actor-based models for network dynamics. Social Networks, 32, 44–60. doi:10.1016/j.socnet.2009.02.004
41.
SunsteinC. R. (2001). Republic.com. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
42.
WojcieszakM. (2010). ‘Don't talk to me’: Effects of ideologically homogeneous online groups and politically dissimilar offline ties on extremism. New Media & Society, 12, 637–655. doi:10.1177/1461444809342775
