Keyword – argumentation

Egres, Dorottya:

Argumentative affordances

How platform features shape argumentative practices on social media

Social media platforms have become important sites for public debate. Since opinion expression in the digital public sphere is often argumentative in nature, i.e. it involves the justification and contestation of standpoints, the technical characteristics of platforms shape, in addition to the forms of communication, the structure of arguments, the dynamics of argumentative interaction and the visibility of contributions. To address this issue, this paper introduces the concept of argumentative affordances and develops a four-dimensional typology encompassing the affordances of argument construction, connection, salience and participation. Further, it shows how these affordances operate at the micro-, meso- and macro-levels and how, when configured together, they jointly shape the opportunities and constraints of online argumentation. The proposed conceptual and analytical framework seeks to strengthen the dialogue between argumentation theory and research on digital media and platforms.

Keywords: affordance, argumentation, online debates, platform studies, social media

Juhász, Vanessza – Bene, Márton:

The online argumentation of political parties and their leaders during the 2022 parliamentary election campaign

Based on the 2022 legislative election campaign, this paper studies how frequently and in what ways certain elements of political debate occur in political actors’ social media communication. We analysed 2,441 Facebook posts issued by parties and party leaders prior to the election. Our findings suggest that political actors engage in opinionated discourse on social media and largely focus on public policy issues. They rarely rely on factual reasoning, but ad hominem fallacy plays a significant role in their Facebook posts. However, other argumentation mistakes occur rarely in their communication. Different actors evince largely identical patterns, but opposition parties and politicians tend to take a more argumentative stance compared to coalition parties and politicians.

Keywords: 2022 parliamentary election campaign, ad hominem, argumentation, Facebook, Frans van Eemeren, political debate, pragmadialectics, social media

Egres, Dorottya:

Strategic maneuvering in the polylogue of nuclear energy

The four reactors of the Paks nuclear power plant need to be shut down in the next decade. In order to maintain the approximately 40 per cent ratio of nuclear energy in the national energy production, Parliament gave its provisional acceptance to the expansion in 2009. The future energy policy of Hungary and the expansion financed and contracted by Russia has been on the political and media agendas ever since. This paper proposes an approach to the extended theory of pragma-dialectics, strategic maneuvering, that is suitable for the analysis of an extended polylogue. It is aimed at showing that the three aspects of strategic maneuvering (audience demand, topical potential, and presentational devices) can also be analysed in extended and spatially not localised argumentative situations with multiple players. For the examination of the three aspects, it studies the public opinion polls about the expansion from 2009 to 2017, and analyses the official online discourse about Paks 2 of selected political, environmentalist and expert actors in the same time period.

Keywords: argumentation, discourse analysis, nuclear energy, political communication, political deliberation, polylogue, pragma-dialectics, public opinion poll, strategic maneuvering