How Should We Study Multiple Platforms? Lessons from Deliberative Systems Theory

Despite agreement that political communication research should move beyond single-platform studies, there is no existing consensus on precisely how to do so. What does it mean to study social media platforms by taking this broader lens – variously referred to as “multiplatform,” “cross-platform,” “comparative,” “ecological,” and/or “systemic”? In this paper, I suggest a new conceptual vocabulary drawn from resources in deliberative systems theory, a field that takes a macro-level, multi-site approach to the study of deliberation and democratic politics. After first reconstructing the core conceptual vocabulary, theoretical premises, and methodological implications of deliberative systems theory, explaining the framework’s main theoretical utility for political communication researchers, I then identify two prominent challenges: questions of methodological approaches and of conceptual framework. I suggest that political communication research on multiple platforms is characterized by different methods – including distinctivist or interactionist approaches to comparison – as well as distinct conceptual frameworks, including structural and interpretivist accounts of the relationship between platforms and the wider environments in which they exist. I conclude by suggesting how attending to these methodological and conceptual questions reveals new directions for political communication research interested in studying complex digital ecosystems. Ultimately, this paper argues for the importance of specifying – and further developing – the normative assumptions, conceptual understandings, and methodological commitments that underpin multi-platform research in political communication.