Conceptualizations on Citizenship: An Online Deliberation on a Contested Concept

Citizenship is a contested and dynamic concept. The available empirical tools for measuring citizens’ attitudes towards citizenship are limited to qualitative studies focusing on specific sub-aspects, and closed survey questions with a dual response pattern. We are missing empirical data to assess what citizenship actually means to people, what aspects are important to them, and how developed opinions are on citizenship as a holistic concept. This paper presents first results of an online deliberation between German citizens about citizenship with the help of the artificial intelligence moderator “Sophie”. The deliberation process is two-staged: Participants discuss a concrete citizenship-related policy issue first, and the broader concept second. Each participant gets only one sitting in the online forum, and engages with artificial arguments. The arguments are based on the Q-statements part of a Q-methodological survey. This survey is used to measure conceptualizations on citizenship amongst participants before and after deliberation. Measures of argument ambivalence will allow assessing whether deliberation leads to opinion formation, argument sophistication, and/ or the extent of understanding for the perspectives of others