Ranking Proposals on Online Deliberative Platforms: a Critical Review

This manuscript focuses on ranking methods for DDPs, i.e., the way plat- forms order proposals in a list when showing them to users. We distinguish three ranking goals: voting, offline deliberation and online deliberation. We concentrate on ranking for online deliberation. Our contribution is threefold. First, we argue that a principled approach to ranking is nec- essary, in light of the democratic objectives of DDPs. Second, inspecting a representative sample of DDPs that are used in practice, we observe that the choice for a ranking method is often ad hoc. Third, we intro- duce three principles for the selection of ranking methods, and argue that one of them, namely maximising approval diversity, should be emphasised in ranking for online deliberation. We thus obtain a conceptual toolbox for platform designers, hosts and users to make and justify choices for a ranking method.

This is joint work together with Frederik van de Putte - my supervisor.

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