Conclusion

Abstract

The general purpose of this book was to evaluate whether the increasing success of the online political debates, which we defined as the virtualization of political debates, can favor the emergence of a more deliberative democratic process or, on the opposite side, whether this phenomenon has no impact or a negative impact on the deliberative-ness of our democracies. The present work has attempted to evaluate the deliberative potential of the online political debates through three interconnected research questions. The first is related to the diffusion of the online debates by observing how widespread the phenomenon is and who the users of the online debates are; the second looks at the offer of the online debates, by analyzing which are the political actors (civil society, media, institutional actors) that are more inclined to host the online political debates; and the third concerns the deliberativeness of the online debates by defining the methods that should be applied for measuring this deliberativeness and by identifying the factors that favor the participative success and deliberativeness of the debates.