Types of Disagreement in Online Political Conversation: Analysis of American Discussions on the Second Impeachment of D. Trump on Social Media
Abstract
In this paper, the author’s aim is to analyze disagreement between participants of political online discussions and its types on the example of discussions about second impeachment of D. Trump in the social network Facebook. For this purpose, content analysis is used (Neuendorf, 2002), which allows to explore the positions of citizens, their interactivity, disagreement, its types in the categories of argumentation and (in)civility. The empirical material is presented by four online discussions of four American media outlets divided by political affiliation to the party: liberal and conservative ones. The article makes a theoretical and methodological contribution to the deliberative research and requires rethinking of Habermasian deliberative theory, drawing attention to the practical content of deliberation and problem of disagreement in a political discussion. The paper concludes that 1) there are disagreements in American online discussions on the example of the second impeachment of D. Trump, but their number is small; 2) they can be characterized mainly as civil and justified rather than uncivil and unjustified; 3) rational consensus on the issue of discussions is not reached by citizens.
AKNOWLEDGEMENT
The research was supported by the Russian Science Foundation: the project No. 21-18-00454 «Mediatized Communication and Modern Deliberative Process» (https://www.rscf.ru/project/21-18-00454/), the project No. 22-18-00364 «Institutional Transformation of E-Participation Governance in Russia: a Study of Regional Peculiarities» (https://rscf.ru/project/22-18-00364/). The theoretical part of research was done in terms of the project No. 21-18-00454, the empirical part — the project No. 22-18-00364.
I express my special gratitude to my PhD thesis supervisor Nikita Yu. Savin.
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