Nuanced studies have scrutinized the facilitative role of digital media in fostering political deliberation and in contributing to the prospect of democratization in (semi-) authoritarian societies. This study illuminates a less-explored facet of non-democratic contexts’ digital politics by shedding light on discourse quality in cyberspace. Guided by Gastil and Black’s analytical–social framework of deliberation, we propose an integrated analytical model comprising seven dimensions and employ a case study approach combined with supervised machine learning to analyze Chinese netizens’ digital engagement with the public policy of “delaying retirement age” on the popular Q&A platform. The findings reveal deliberative virtues—topic relevance, rationality, and civility—alongside a low presence of political alienation and minimal institutional alignment, suggesting generally strong analytical performance. In contrast, the social dimension, represented by argument reciprocity and transpositional consideration, remains weak, reflecting a lack of sustained interaction. Based on these empirical results, we coin the concept of the “ solo of deliberator ” to describe a pattern of online deliberation where analytical reasoning prevails while social engagement is subdued. Implications for deliberative democracy in non-democratic nations are discussed.
Guan et al. (Thu,) studied this question.