Examining the Quality of Crowdsourced Deliberation

We examine deliberative quality of crowdsourced deliberation in this paper. Analyzing data from two crowdsourced policy-making processes, we found a good quality deliberation with respect, reciprocity, and storytelling according to the standards in the theory of deliberative democracy. We identified a group of super-deliberators, whose deliberation was above the average, and low-quality deliberators, whose deliberation was below the average. The findings show that even when crowdsourced policymaking was not designed for deliberation, it can facilitate a fairly high-quality democratic deliberation.