Clicks, Comments, and Contributions: Interactivity on Austria's Deliberation Platform During the (Pre-)Parliamentary Review Process

A recently published report on democracy monitoring in Austria shows a strong public interest in expanding political participation: 61% of respondents were in favor of more opportunities for participation. Specifically, 52% expressed a desire to understand how laws are made, while 66% wanted better access to information about proposed legislation. To meet this demand, this study examines the role of digital participation platforms in improving deliberative democracy, focusing on interactivity as a key dimension of deliberative quality. The research focuses on a top-down participation platform set up by the Austrian parliament to enable citizen participation during the (pre-)parliamentary review process. This platform institutionalizes public participation in the drafting of laws and is an example of a participatory approach to policymaking. In the 2019-2024 legislative period, over 500,000 comments were submitted, a large proportion of which related to COVID-19 regulations. The opinions are publicly accessible via the Austrian Parliament's website - provided the authors of the opinions have confirmed their publication. Their metadata can be accessed via an open JSON data platform, which provides a comprehensive and transparent data set for analysis. Based on theories of deliberative democracy, this study evaluates the deliberative quality of the throughput phase. The entire deliberative process - consisting of context, input, throughput and output - is conceptualized as part of the public sphere, which functions as an intermediary system. The research focuses on interactivity by considering draft laws as inputs to the deliberative process and analyzing comments and their associated metadata as elements of throughput. This includes analyzing who submitted the comments, when they were submitted, what issues were raised and how much public support they received, as indicated by the number of “likes”. A comparative approach serves as the central framework for analyzing the differences in interactivity between different policy areas. To facilitate this analysis, topics are categorized into predefined groups such as public health, international affairs and public infrastructure. By linking comments to their respective topics, this approach enables the identification of significant differences in interactivity as measured by the number of comments and likes in different policy contexts. In particular, the analysis examines whether the levels of interactivity vary significantly between policy areas. If such differences are observed, the study will examine the underlying characteristics of these policy areas - issue polarization or topic complexity - that could be responsible for these differences. This study contributes to Section 17 by demonstrating how extensive citizen input can be effectively generated and integrated into online deliberation processes, with a particular focus on interactivity as a key dimension of deliberation quality. By examining the Austrian participation platform in the context of its integration into the broader democratic system, the study also explores the embedding of participatory innovation in formal institutional frameworks and offers insights into its systemic role and influence on legislative processes.