This article proposes and tests a reproducible framework for a computational method to measure social media-based deliberative discourse by analyzing commentary surrounding the Canadian convoy protests of COVID-19 vaccine mandates and restrictions. Employing a combination of analytic calculations, alongside tools such as Google Perspective and Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC), this article assesses the quality of online deliberative discourse using established measures of deliberation including the variables rationality, interactivity, equality, and civility. We propose computational approaches to measuring these variables, and work toward validating our approach by observing correlations between an established computational measure of online deliberation-cognitive complexity. This computational approach is tested using Twitter and Reddit commentary related to the convoy protests that took place in Ottawa, Canada, during February 2022, which influenced the emergence of similar protests around the world. In addition to testing our proposed online deliberative discourse measurement framework, this case study provides insight into the deliberative characteristics of the Twitter and Reddit social media platforms.

Scholars have repeatedly expressed concern about the societal consequences of negative media coverage toward public institutions and political actors. Yet, there remains a lack of systemic understanding about the determinants of this cynical attitude. To examine this issue, we combine aggregate data on political and economic performance with Worlds of Journalism Study (WJS) survey data on journalists' institutional trust, watchdog and loyalty roles, editorial autonomy, professional experience, and news media ownership. Derived from interviews with 27, 657 journalists from 67 countries included in the second wave of the WJS (2012-2016), results show that democracy and press freedom are negatively correlated with journalists' institutional trust. Quite notably, autonomous and watchdog journalists are less trusting than loyal journalists. The findings also suggest that corruption levels, annual economic growth, and type of media ownership are essential determinants in this regard.

Big Data and Democracy, edited by Kevin Macnish and Jai Galliott, offers an assortment of recent research into pressing points of inquiry related to the democratic impact of “big data.” The primary...

evaluate LHINs. And yet the aspirational spirit of deliberative democracy that suffused the 1990s is woven throughout this analysis. The author argues that LHINs have not been successful in “metadeliberation”: the engagement of regular people in the design of governance structures. Yet he also documents very crisply how most people prefer involvement in specific and concrete aspects of health care delivery over more abstract and technical aspects of governance design. Unlike the 1990s, where the move toward health care regionalization assumed that ordinary people would be clamouring to become involved in health policy, the current manifestation toward citizen engagement accepts that this is not a priority for most people. Most popular engagement in health care now tends toward the more localized and specific practice of “patient-oriented” health care (although this, too, is an unrepentantly fuzzy concept). The book’s hopeful elaboration of metadeliberation is sweet but overly romantic. Here is where an exacting demand for transparency would be considerably more effective in securing accountability across health authorities. A skeptic might also suggest that the layers of additional administration required by deliberative democracy, including “public engagement brokers” who monitor whether input at lower levels has been adopted in higher-level decision making, might lead to even more administrative congestion in the decision-making process. Nonetheless, given the dominance of health care within the public service domain (and given how vulnerable many people are when they access it), the question of how to evaluate responsiveness and accountability in health care governance is one we should be asking. As Ontario shifts back toward a more centralized system, incorporating the model of a single health authority in play in many other provinces, once again it has the benefit of learning from other jurisdictions’ experiences. There are advantages to amalgamation, but to the extent that decision making becomes more tightly controlled at the top, dissatisfaction can develop at the peripheries as local voices are stifled ( just ask physicians in Cape Breton). Yes, health care is about providing the right services to the right people at the right time. But without the right voices being heard, this may be far more complicated than the Ontario government anticipates.

Journalist Safety and Self-Censorship, edited by Anna Grondahl Larsen, Ingrid Fadnes, and Roy Krovel, examines the reciprocal impact of journalist safety and self-censorship within different global...

Democracy in Canada: The Disintegration of Our Institutions by Donald J. Savoie represents a highly cumulative analysis of Canada’s democratic system, built upon theories of historical institutiona...