Civility in Online Discussion: The Case of the Foreign Policy Dialogue

This paper focuses on Web-based discussion in an online policy consultation and examines specific discourse features to evaluate how the concept of civility served to shape public discourse in a moderated, rule-based forum. The study results reveal that citizen participants in the case study under consideration developed, maintained, and enforced norms of civil discourse, and that these norms helped to promote understanding and consensus-building. The study also cautions that civil dialogue alone cannot ensure effective communication between governments and citizens. Civil dialogue can be used to marginalize some participants, and it does not necessarily allow dialogue participants to effectively transmit their opinions to government decision-makers.