Supporting Argumentation in Online Political Debate: Evidence From an Experiment of Collective Deliberation

In this paper we report the results of an e-democracy experiment in which a group of supporters of a large political party were asked to debate online about ways to reform the electoral law. We compare a traditional forum with an online collaborative argumentation platform to capture the various proposals and their associated pros and cons. The aim of the study is to assess the capability of this toolto support online collective deliberation in a real world case,as compared to anonline discussion supported by a forum.By comparing users’ experience across several metrics related to usability, activity levels, and quality of collaboration our findings show that the forum produced more activity and ideas and its users perceived a better quality of the collaboration process, while the argumentation tool helped to reduce the amount of self-referential arguments and encourage viewing and rating of others’ posts