Does the increasing usage of online political forums lead to a more deliberative democracy? This book answers to this question by presenting the evolution of the public spaces in a historical perspective, by defining and operationalizing the deliberative criteria of democracy, and by measuring and evaluating the impact ofvirtualization of the political debates under threes perspectives. It looks at the extent to which different categories of the population debate online, it looks at the categories of actors hosting online political forum, and it assesses the quality of the online political debates in different contexts. The final aim of this work is to provide a more balanced evaluation of the impact ofvirtualization of the political debates and to enrich the evolving deliberative theory with new findings. 

Raphaël Kies is Researcher in Political Science at the University of Luxembourg. He is Co-founder of the E-democracy Center (Switzerland), he is member of the Réseau de Démocratie ELectronique (France) and of the ECPR standing group on Internet&Politics. In Luxembourg he is co-responsible for the national and European electoral studies, and for the introduction of innovative methods of political participation such as the voting advice applicationsmartvote.lu and theEuropean Citizens Consultation. He has published several articles and reports on e-democracy, local democracy, and deliberative democracy.