Poliitilised blogid poliitilise kommunikatsiooni vahendina

This master thesis titled „Political Blogs as Means of Political Communication” studies the role of political blogs in the emergence of political discussion and deliberative democracy during the time period between elections. The theoretical part of the thesis presents an overview of the approaches to information and communication technologies, first describing the two most significant approaches to the relationship between technology and the society. The thesis deals with the public sphere and the most significant theorists of this sphere but also with the concepts of political communication and participatory democracy; it introduces the empirical viewpoints regarding e-democracy and the subject of positioned political blogs discussed in similar studies. This thesis uses content analysis for the analysing of political blogs in order to observe the subjects discussed in the blog posts and the frequency of such subjects. A large proportion of the analysis is dedicated to the comments to the blog posts in order to observe which subjects written about in political blogs are commented and what the content of such comments is. This thesis analyses two units of text: the blog posts and the comments to the post. After the mapping of political blogs the formal criteria for the selecting of the sample were determined on the basis of which the final sample of the political blogs was put together. Two criteria were kept in mind in putting together the sample: 1) the number of posts; 2) the number of comments. Among all the blogs observed, 20 blogs were selected on the basis of the number of posts published and the TOP 3 most commented blogs, which made up the final sample of the political blogs. Key findings: 19 politicians made 3120 posts to their blogs during 13 months, which means that there were an average of 12.63 posts published per politician each month. • On the basis of the number of posts published during 13 months, the five most active bloggers were Toivo Ellakvere, Marko Mihkelson, Gerd Tarand, Jaak Juske and Virgo Kruve. 94 posts of the political blogs received a total of 1354 comments. Judging from the number of comments, the most popular politicians were Edgar Savisaar, Sirje Kingsepp, Marek Strandberg, Marko Mihkelson and Evelyn Sepp. • Almost 2/3 of the politicians encouraged readers to comments their posts in at least one post but, all in all, the larger proportion of the blog posts were made up by the monologue of the authors. • The most frequent subjects discussed in political blogs were domestic policy, economic affairs and communications and foreign policy. Fewer posts were written on the matters of culture and social affairs. Among sub-subjects discussed, the most common were those concerning the parliament of Estonia (Riigikogu), the work of the government and local governments but also media and new media. The war in Georgia and the foreign policy of Russia were the subjects of foreign policy that were most frequently written about in blog posts. The issues that were most frequently commented in political blogs were the issues of domestic policy, economic affairs and communications and foreign policy. The issues that were commented the least were from the sphere of social affairs. The following odd sub-subjects received the most feedback: media and new media, environmental policy, energy, nature conservation, the war in Georgia and the issues regarding the parliament of Estonia (Riigikogu), the work of the government and local governments. The characteristics of rational discussion: • More than 90% of the comments to the posts of political blogs were neutral or non-attacking, which is a very good result from the point of view of encouraging political discussions. • In all the comments, the sources of information presented were referred to in 15% of the comments and references to the sources were non-existent in 85% of the comments. • From the point of view of rational discussion, it is positive that the comments reflecting dissenting opinions made up a more prominent percentage of the analysis and that people tended more to disagree than to agree with matters in their comments. • From the point of view of political discussion and the aforementioned points, the blogs of the following authors can be pointed out: Kadri Simson, Marko Mihkelson, Toivo Ellakvere and Sirje Kingsepp. • Attacking comments, ungrounded opinions, the tendency to not refer to the sources and not responding to comments were more common in the blog posts of Edgar Savisaar, Priit Toobal and Jürgen Ligi. Looking at the various results achieved it can be said that there was a sufficient number of factors promoting the functioning of deliberative democracy existing in political blogs. In future studies a more specific methodology that would facilitate the analysing of political discussion in political forums and political blogs should be determined. On the basis of the results of this thesis it was discovered that information and communication technologies alone do not encourage the emergence of deliberative democracy. The analysis of political blogs proved that the relationships and the structure of social relationships existing in reality have a substantial influence on the emergence of the public sphere in the virtual world and technology alone cannot change the character of social relationships. However, the limitations of this thesis did not allow for the quantitative analysis of texts, which would have enabled to observe how and with the help of which methods politicians expressed themselves and what the dominant rhetoric used in the comments was like. As a possible step further from political blogs, the qualitative analysis of blog posts should be carried out as well.http://www.ester.ee/record=b4037342*es