Deliberative Platform Design: The case study of the online discussions in Decidim Barcelona

摘要

With the irruption of ICTs and the crisis of political representation, manyonline platforms have been developed with the aim of improving participatorydemocratic processes. However, regarding platforms for online petitioning,previous research has not found examples of how to effectively introducediscussions, a crucial feature to promote deliberation. In this study we focuson the case of Decidim Barcelona, the online participatory-democracy platformlaunched by the City Council of Barcelona in which proposals can be discussedwith an interface that combines threaded discussions and comment alignment withthe proposal. This innovative approach allows to examine whether neutral,positive or negative comments are more likely to generate discussion cascades.The results reveal that, with this interface, comments marked as negativelyaligned with the proposal were more likely to engage users in onlinediscussions and, therefore, helped to promote deliberative decision making.