Reply structure and participation in online conversations enabled by argumentation platforms: A real world experiment of collective deliberation in e-democracy

In this paper we report evidence from a collective deliberation experiment in which the supporters of a political party were asked to debate online about ways to reform the electoral law. We compared a forum with an argumentation platform, an online collaboration tool that supports the construction of a collective map representing the debate in terms of issues, proposals, pros and cons. We analyze the structural proprieties of the reply networks generated in the two conditions. Our findings show that forum generated more redundant ideas and highly central speakers, whereas the argumentation platform tested in this study favored viewing and rating of others’ posts, produced more arguments per idea, and promoted brokerage between users belonging to different subgroups.