Online discourse integration, or the degree to which online user comments are
responsive, that is, address or refer to other debate participants, is a normatively valued
yet neglected quality dimension of online discussions. This preregistered study features
the first cross-country/cross-platform investigation of online discourse integration,
using manual and computational content analysis (N = 9835 and N = 30,753 positional
news reader comments). Unexpectedly, about one quarter of the comments was
responsive in both majoritarian and consensus-oriented democracies (Australia/United
States vs Germany/Switzerland) and on platforms that separate or mix public and
private contexts (websites vs Facebook pages of mainstream media), even though other
deliberative quality criteria were previously shown to vary by country and platform.
Comments that are responsive to fellow commenters in the opposing perspective
camp were more likely to contain negative evaluations of those addressed, whereas
comments responsive within the same perspective camp were more likely to contain
positive evaluations.
