Contexts of Contestation: Public Deliberation across Political Systems, Sociocultural Divides and News Media

We investigate the macro-social forces that shape the structure of public contestation across different types of news media and social contexts and consider their operation with regard to one of the most intractable social questions of our time: What is be the role of religion in public life, and what should it be? Using an original dataset of about 2 million contributions to this public debate in six countries (Australia, Germany, Lebanon, Switzerland, Turkey, and the USA) and in three types of media (printed newspapers, news websites, and political blogs), we examine the sociocultural and technological antecedents of inclusion and justification in public debate. We show how the democratic institutions (majoritarian versus consensus) and degree of cultural division (stable versus contested secularism) in a country shape whose voices get heard and how much public justification of public policy occurs. We also show how the shift from traditional to online debate impacts public discussion of intractable social problems and the significance of the transition towards a greater importance of user-driven opinionated discourse in public debate. In sum, this paper identifies the degree to which the sociocultural and technological contexts produce specific assemblages of actors, political positions, and justificatory practices in mediated public debate. These findings show how the capacity of public discourse to transform intractable societal conflict into robust debate is shaped by the political and technological conditions from which it emerges.