Abstract
There has been a growing concern regarding political disengagement among citizens within liberal western representative democracies. This concern has brought about calls for local political online forums to be used to support participatory and deliberative democracy online to reverse this trend. However, little empirical investigation has been conducted into what such forums can support in terms of deliberative democracy. This paper, focusing solely on deliberation will answer the following question: Can local political online forums support all categories of deliberation? A two pronged methodological approach consisting of both a quantitative deductive method and a qualitative inductive method was used to examine this research question. This paper argues that within the literature deliberation falls into three main categories. However, another form of online discussion was identified as part of this empirical research named Cross Cutting Discussion.
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