Deliberation 2.0 or Radicalized Partisan Discourse? The online political discussion on the Facebook profiles of Spanish political candidates

Abstract

The increasing relevance of social networks as a means of political communication arouses the research interest about the features that characterize the conversations taking place on these platforms. The present study intends to analyze the characteristics of the political discussions taking place on the Facebook walls of three Spanish political candidates running for the General Election 2011. A double methodological approach will help us evaluate the concurrence of different normative conditions of deliberative democracy, on the one hand, and estimate the ideological coincidence between the discursive strategies expressed by the citizens and the party/candidate’s ideological positions. Our results suggest that far from a rational debate between divergent opinions, the citizen comments expressed on the candidates’ walls take place in a context of strong ideological consensus, so that they tend to reproduce the party/candidate issue positions and even radicalize them.