Virtual Deliberation An Ethnography of Online Political Discussion in Hungary By Ildikó Kaposi A Doctoral Dissertation Submitted to the Central European University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Department of Political Science 8 September, 2006 TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................2 CHAPTER I: POLITICAL DISCUSSION IN THEORY, PRACTICE, AND HISTORY Democratic Theories and Political Discussion: The economic approach to political discussion – Participatory theories and political discussion – Discussion and decision making: the deliberative position.......................................................................................................................................6 Arenas of deliberation: Deliberative experiments across the world – Deliberation unbound – Media, participation, and deliberation – Everyday talk as participation – Models of talk – Everyday talk in the deliberative system – Empirical findings on everyday talk – Fluidity and boundaries.................................................................................................................................13 Everyday political talk in history: Habermas and his critics – Arenas and standards of 18th-century political discussion – Discussion in fact and theory....................................................................................................31 CHAPTER II: ICTS AND DEMOCRACY Visions of an ICT-enabled participatory public sphere – Politics and technologies of the ‘participatory public sphere’.....................................................................................................42 Citizen engagement online: The demand side – The supply side - Taking deliberative experiments to the internet – The beginnings of “the great conversation”...............................49 Online deliberation: the vulgata edition: Low standards of discussion – Depoliticisation and commercialisation – Fragmentation – The limits of inclusion.................................................58 CHAPTER III: DELIBERATIVE DEMOCRACY IN THE CONTEXT OF HUNGARY Post-dictatorship and deliberation – A ‘deliberative deficit’ – Historical dis-closures Discursive arenas and political participation in Hungary – Associational life and civic participation – Discussion networks – Mediated participatory arenas......................................71 ICTs and politics in Hungary – The broadcasting model – ICTs at the grassroots – The politics of online discussion......................................................................................................84 CHAPTER IV: VIRTUAL ETHNOGRAPHY Research questions and method – Interviewing participants – Sampling – Making contact – Political preferences – Sketchy socio-demographic data – Issues of translation – Ethical considerations............................................................................................................................95 CHAPTER V: POLITIKA FORUM 1. The great division Participants Left and Right – Bridges over the divide......................................................107 2. Standards and practices of discussion The quality of talk – Reciprocity and accountability – Reasoned argumentation..... 1 3. The name of the game Politika forum as play – Order and play – Secrecy and anonymity – The slanging-match – “Discursive machismo” vs. cooperation – ‘Creative writing’ – Popular culture on the forum.................................................................................................................................120 4. Politika forum and the Hungarian public sphere Publicity and online talk – Political activism on the forum – Deliberative dis-closures – Surfacing taboos – “I hate the Hungarian people so” – The triumph of the IRL – A clubbable crowd – Postscript............................................................................................157 5. Conclusion..................................................................................................................189 REFERENCES............................................................................................................................192 2 INTRODUCTION On a hot summer day in June 2006, I was queuing in front of a greengrocer’s on Klauzál tér in the VIIth district in Budapest. A woman in her fifties, bespectacled, with short hair dyed a dark brown, and wearing an ankle-length white skirt and a long-sleeved white top despite the heat, had just asked the greengrocer for a kilo of strawberries. “Protekciós epret”, said the woman, thereby setting me an impossible task of repeating in English what it was that she wanted. For while ‘epret’ is easily translated as ‘strawberries’, there is no English equivalent that would capture the meaning of protekciós in its entirety. Dictionary entries list ‘patronized’, ‘backed’, ‘using back-stair influence’, ‘pulling strings’ to describe the term. But the woman was also trying to request preferential treatment by invoking a practice that had been central to managing everyday life under the decades of soft dictatorship in Hungary. Helping each other out through informal networks, seeking favours in exchange for favours, and in the process bending the rules if necessary was a pervasive way of getting what one wanted – right down to a pound of decent fruit. The greengrocer, a jovial moustached man also in his fifties, had picked up the customer’s meaning, and he replied, “Ma’am, the Kádár era is over. There is no more protekciós strawberry”. Slightly flustered, the woman hastened to add that she was taking the strawberries to someone who was in hospital, and then, just to be on the safe side, she repeated that the greengrocer should nevertheless add a few protekciós strawberries to the bag of fruit he was putting together for her. “If I have nice fruit, everyone gets it”, the greengrocer responded. And then he added, “What would Kádár say if he heard what you’ve just said?” Others in the line picked up the theme and started making jokes about the demise of protekciós strawberries and how they too would be glad to get some of those. In the 3 meantime, the woman paid the greengrocer, grabbed her bag of fruit, and walked away without another word. This scene at the greengrocer’s involved a mundane setting and a banal issue, but the circumstances only highlight the importance of the incident. For a few moments, the market of Klauzál tér was transformed into the forum, a public space where citizens were actively making sense of politics in everyday life. Such flashes of democratic meaning making are pervasive, but they tend to be ignored in academic research in Hungary. They belong to the sphere of everyday life which does not routinely feature in assessments of political participation or the state of democracy. The appearance of information and communication technologies (ICTs), and especially the internet, holds the promise of extending participatory opportunities to increasingly wide layers of society. In this process, the meaning of the political is also extended to activities and arenas not considered to be politically relevant before. ICTs make everyday political exchanges not only more accessible to citizens, but also more visible to theorists and researchers. It is from these assumptions that the dissertation starts out, and it brings together a diverse set of academic traditions to examine how the mundane exchanges of citizens, as exemplified by the face-to-face scene featuring the strawberries, can become important for democracy. Democratic theory, internet studies, political communication, and history provide the theoretical background to this inquiry aimed at exploring in depth the daily working of an online Hungarian discussion forum dedicated to politics. In an attempt to bridge the divide between the political and the cultural approaches to communication phenomena, the dissertation also relies on culturalist analysis where it is relevant. Amidst the borrowing, mixture, and hybridity of theories, the dissertation runs the risk of acquiring a stamp of bricolage. However, the arguments throughout the chapters are driven by the conviction, also 4 born out by the research, that “Discussion is a way of combining information and enlarging the range of arguments. At least in the course of time, the effects of common deliberation seem bound to improve matters” (Rawls 1971) (p. 359). 5 CHAPTER 1: POLITICAL DISCUSSION IN THEORY, PRACTICE, AND HISTORY Democratic Theories and Political Discussion Political discussion is a fact of life. It is a practice that is present in everyday life: citizens either engage in it actively with varying frequency, or at the least they can recognise it and understand it to be an integral part of life under democracy. Conceptualising its role, however, is made more difficult by the competing theoretical frameworks of democracy that rely on different conceptions of human reason, the sphere of the political, citizen participation, or the possibility of articulating the common good. Accordingly, political discussion can at the extremes be dismissed as meaningless and irrelevant, or celebrated as the lifeblood of democracy. The emergence of deliberative theories of democracy, which signalled a ‘communicative turn’ in political thought, seems to have tipped the scales for the latter conception. At the same time, there are competing theories of democracy that continue