Larvatus Prodeo

Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber posts about a paper he co-authored with Eric Lawrence and John Sides - “Self-Segregation or Deliberation? Blog Readership, Participation and Polarization in American Politics”. The paper, which is a work in progress, can be downloaded from here [registration required] or here [direct link to pdf].

There is active debate among political scientists and political theorists over the relationship between participation and deliberation among citizens with different political viewpoints. Internet based blogs provide an important testing ground for these scholars’ theories, especially as political activity on the Internet becomes increasingly important. In this article, we use the first major dataset describing blog readership to examine the relationship between deliberation, polarization and political participation among blog readers. We find that, as existing theories might predict, blog readers tend to read blogs that accord with their political beliefs. Cross-cutting readership of blogs on both the left and right of the spectrum is relatively rare. Furthermore, we find strong evidence of polarization among blogreaders, who tend to be more polarized than both non-blog-readers and consumers of various television news, and roughly as polarized as US Senators

The data on which they rely in order to form their conclusions is American, of course, but I doubt the picture would be very different in Australia. It’s interesting, in passing, to note that those blog readers who do look at blogs outside their ideological comfort zone are more likely to be left-wing than right-wing. As the authors state in the abstract (part of which is reproduced above), the jumping off point for the research is partly the political science debate about the value of deliberation.

I’ve never been particularly convinced by a lot of the normative literature on deliberative democracy, because I think it suffers from the same sort of defects that some of its key influences - particularly Jurgen Habermas’ work on the public sphere - have. (And, incidentally, to defend Habermas for a moment, I think a lot of the application of his concepts - including the key one of “communicative rationality” - misses their contexts and also overlooks the methodological status of an “ideal type” - but I’ve said more about that here.)

Deliberation is obviously not a bad thing, but I’d argue partisanship isn’t necessarily a bad thing either (and deliberation has its drawbacks - partly related to the degree to which it excludes those who don’t talk the lingo and the claim that’s often made that the identity of “citizen” is one that obscures or elides other social identities). I think it’s possible to advocate for deliberation and policy transparency - and the thorny notion of “evidence based policy” - without giving up the idea that politics is and should be about fundamental value-orientations - what Max Weber would call “substantive rationality” - whose cracks can’t be papered over.

There is just no easy way to reconcile the balance between the Enlightenment triad of liberty, equality and solidarity, and the decision to privilege - say - liberty is an ungrounded one in terms of formal rationality - that is to say, it’s a choice of value orientation and is no more or no less rational than a decision to privilege equality. (The status of the third term - solidarity - is important here, but to go as far down that track as I’d like would take me too far away from what I want to argue here). In other words, I don’t believe there is or should be a politics “beyond left or right” or that one side can claim to embody a higher rationality. It’s all about decisions about ends, which then shape means (and “democracy” is perhaps best thought of as a means rather than as an end in itself).

There is, of course, good and bad partisanship also. But it’s worth pointing out that partisanship does not necessarily imply an absence of civility and a closed mind, even if it often does (but, conversely, “centrism” or an orientation towards “evidence” without overt value choices often implies arrogance and blindness towards one’s own underlying interests and political commitments).

To return to the more immediate concerns of the paper, and the debate more generally, I think what’s often missed in normative expectations about the way blogging might or might not foster citizenship is the fact that that word is under-theorised - as Terry Flew has recently argued in a similar context, and hides some quite inconsistent practices. For instance, one of the goods that normative political theory, (and therefore empirical political science through its background assumptions), often celebrates is “political efficacy” - that is to say, a willingness to engage. It’s often conflated with trust in institutions and respect for fora, and conceals an assumption that those institutions themselves should enjoy legitimacy. But it - and citizenship more generally - is also too often mapped along a vertical and individualised dimension - so there’s a gain when more individuals start engaging actively with public concerns (and by inference with the state).

But the horizontal dimension of citizenship is too often obscured - and that takes me back to the value of “solidarity”. To me, the formation of community and the process of collective practices of opinion formation (and - of course - there is opinion formation going on in a quasi-deliberative manner within both right wing and left wing blogs - another point I think is overlooked) have a value in and of themselves - because they lead to the creation and recreation of political collectivities who are capable of concerted action. That need not be inconsistent with the formation of a more enlightened public conceived of as a set of individuals, who might enter and exit various fora and debates, but it certainly is a much richer model of participation than the “letter to the editor” model or - I’d argue - the policy talking shop between experts that I think are often the lodestones for deliberation - at least as a regulative ideal.

All this isn’t really by way of critique of the paper in question - more to use it as a jumping off point for some further reflections which arose in part from my participation in this session at the recent CCi conference and a very good question asked at that session by Melissa Gregg, which I intend to reflect further on. It basically goes to the notion of “counter-publics” - that is to say, publics of otherwise excluded or marginalised individuals who might come together through the mediation of the blogosphere (and other practices online), and whether there’s not a public good which is potentially greater than the ability of already switched-on publics who reflect the norm in sociological terms to further leverage their influence deliberatively. I think it probably is - and here I’m thinking of queer communities, of feminist communities, and indeed of all sorts of communities not made up of or dominated by white blokes in suits who “do policy”.

But more on that later. I also think there’s a line of argument arising from these thoughts towards the question of political participation by “youth” - something Ariadne Vromen has recently written on again and which I’ll be coming back to - and my strongly held view that there’s a liberatory and transformative potential in online political action which is only just starting to be recognised. As a practice, of course, it’s been going on for some time whether or not it gets the academic and media recognition or virtual tick from the gatekeepers of what does and does not constitute the political in a wired world.