Esau, K. (2025). The quality of connections: Deliberative reciprocity and inclusive listening as antidote to destructive polarization online. Social Media + Society, 11, 20563051251332421. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051251332421
Summary
This theoretical article diagnoses how extreme polarization on social media corrodes core functions of democratic public communication, and proposes a conceptual remedy. Esau extends the framework of connective democracy to bridge two largely separate bodies of work — empirical research on online deliberation and research on polarization — and refines the notion of destructive polarization as something observable in user-generated content. Against this, she advances deliberative reciprocity and inclusive listening as normative and analytical antidotes: practices and orientations that preserve the productive role of disagreement while resisting the symptoms that turn conflict corrosive.
Key Contributions
- Refines and extends the concept of connective democracy as a bridge between deliberation and polarization scholarship.
- Introduces destructive polarization as a distinct analytical category with identifiable symptoms in online discourse.
- Proposes deliberative reciprocity and inclusive listening as conceptual tools to counter destructive polarization.
- Reframes the normative stance on conflict: disagreement is healthy; it is destructive forms of polarization specifically that threaten democratic communication.
Methods
Conceptual and theoretical work, not empirical analysis. The paper synthesizes literatures on online deliberation, polarization, and connective democracy, building a typology of destructive-polarization symptoms and articulating reciprocity and listening as countervailing communicative norms.
Findings
- Destructive polarization can be defined through observable discursive symptoms in user-generated content (rather than only as a property of attitudes or party systems).
- Deliberative reciprocity — mutual responsiveness across difference — and inclusive listening are theorized as mechanisms that directly address those symptoms.
- Connective democracy provides a productive frame for integrating the normative ideals of deliberation with the empirical realities of platformed publics.
Connections
This article sits on the normative-theoretical side of a topic cluster otherwise dominated by empirical studies of polarized online discourse, and is most directly in dialogue with work that treats incivility, toxicity, and cross-cutting talk on platforms — see Rossini2026-jn on disagreement and incivility, Knupfer2025-vt on hostile interactions, and Kalsnes2025-zb on platformed conflict dynamics. Its concern with how algorithmic and network conditions shape exposure and reciprocity connects to Bakshy2015-rn on cross-ideological exposure and to Starbird2025-jj on the structural drivers of online polarization, while its deliberative framing complements empirical accounts of partisan affect such as Mosleh2024-op.