Study On Rules Of Online Deliberation From The Perspective Of Public Deliberation

As a typical form of digital governance,online deliberation not only enriches the communication channels for the government to ask the public about policies,demands,and measures,which in turn helps it optimize its decision-making mechanism and improve administrative efficiency,but also provides an important public sphere for the public and other stakeholders to participate in public affairs and express their demands.However,although the existing online political platforms have technically solved the difficulties of offline public participation,which is easily restricted by time and space,there are still difficulties in the process of public participation in online discussions,such as scattered opinions,low degree of discourse structure,lack of rationality and understanding in the discussion process,and difficulties in converging opinions and reaching consensus.This thesis argues that these dilemmas are largely due to the lack of rules of online deliberation.Since the 1990 s,as a complement to representative democracy,deliberative democracy has begun to attract widespread attention in academia.As the theoretical core of deliberative democracy,public deliberation emphasizes the operation and regulation of the former at the practical level and advocates that participants communicate about public affairs on the premise of fairness,impartiality,and openness.Publicity,participation,equality,freedom,inclusiveness,and reciprocity together constitute the basic principles of public deliberation,whose core elements include public responsibility,fairness and openness,rational communication,preference revision,and decision support.Governed by reason and rules,all parties can fully express and voluntarily revise their views and ideas to reach a consensus and use them to support decision-making.It can be seen that the rules of public deliberation fit the demand for rules in online deliberation.Focusing on the dilemma of online deliberation,this thesis firstly extracts the elements of deliberation rules from two sources: firstly,it extracts the elements including subjects,objects,principles,places,forms,and goals from offline meeting techniques;secondly,it extracts the elements of institutional rules,management rules and dialogue rules from typical online political platforms through case study and textual analysis.Then,based on these elements,the rules of public deliberation applicable to the context of online politics are constructed,which include the rules related to the participants,the content of the dialogue,the way of the dialogue,and the operation of the deliberation process.Then,this thesis incorporates the above rules into the rule framework of online deliberation and explains them from the organizational dimension,process dimension,and technical dimension respectively.This thesis proposes that:(1)from the organizational dimension,the rules of online deliberation should cover three levels:institutional design,platform building,and communication;(2)from the process dimension,public deliberation is the core section of the transaction flow of online deliberation,both for the government asking the public and vice versa;(3)from the technical dimension,the implementation of discussion rules is a direct means to practice public deliberation.Second,to verify the actual effect of deliberation rules in online political platforms,this thesis summarizes the key techniques,proposes a system design solution,and uses the prototype system to experimentally verify the effect of online deliberative rules.The experiment uses a posttest-only control group design.The main findings are:(1)regardless of anonymity or real names,discussions that follow the deliberative rules mostly produce more positive results than regular discussions and improve the quality of political discussions;(2)optimizing the online political platforms based on deliberative rules can positively affect participants' views and values,opinion consistency,participants' sense of efficacy,and their trust in the organization.Finally,based on the gap between the reality and the ideal state of online deliberation,this thesis closely focuses on the realization of the rules of public deliberation and proposes a practical path of the rules of online deliberation from the practical basis,ethical norms,introduction strategies,operation mechanism and institutional guarantee.