New Frontiers in Studying Online Politics

Abstract

During the past decade online politics has become an important field of studies, which has grown dramatically. However, the attention for methodological aspects has often been weak and unsystematic. Our goal thus lies in illuminating such issues, both in term of theoretical paradigms and research techniques. As for the former, we will consider both more consolidated theory-guided paradigms and emerging and explorative perspectives. As for the latter, we will address both quantitative and qualitative methods. Especially since the emergence of web 2.0, scholars of political participation are getting more and more interested in online politics. We need to understand what such research tells us about the second generation of web applications in order to understand if these phenomena are at all new. As a new portion of the public sphere, we are especially interested in the discursive dynamics taking place in cyberspace and in the new research tools developed to study dialogical processes. Some of the questions we want to raise are as follows: are explorative perspectives (i.e. grounded theory approach) able to uncover new political phenomena in cyberspace that go beyond our existing theoretical lenses? Are consolidated theoretical paradigms of political participation capable of shedding light on the black box of online politics? Which are pros and cons of different research techniques applied to online politics?

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