In recent years, we have witnessed an increasing consolidation of different realms where citizens can deliberate and discuss a variety of topics of general interest, including politics. The comments on news posts in online media are a good example. The first theoretical contributions called attention to the potential of those spaces to build a healthy (civic and participatory) public sphere, going much deeper in the process of political dialogue and deliberation (Fung, Gilman, & Shkabatur, 2013; Lilleker & Jackson, 2008; O’Reilly, 2005; Stromer-Galley & Wichowski, 2011). Polarization has been configured as a constant feature of the quality of the mentioned dialogues, particularly in Mediterranean countries (polarized pluralists’ cases). One of the research challenges at the moment has to do with the scrutiny of polarization within the political deliberation provoked by news stories. The goal of this article is the analysis of political dialogue from the perspective of the polarization in the increasingly popular network YouTube, which is presenting very particular characteristics. Using a sample of almost 400,000 posted comments about diverse topics (climate change, the Catalonian crisis, and Political parties’ electoral ads) we propose an automated method in order to measure polarization. Our hypothesis is that the number of comments (quantitative variable) is positively related to their polarization (qualitative variable). We will also include in the examination information about the ideological editorial line of newspapers, the type of topic under discussion, the amount of traceable dialogue, etc. We propose an index to (1) measure the polarization of each comment and use it to show how this value has behaved over time; and (2) verify the hypothesis using the average polarization of comments for each video.

中文翻译：

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衡量在线政治对话：极化会引发更多审议吗？

近年来，我们目睹了越来越多的不同领域的合并，公民可以在其中讨论和讨论各种普遍感兴趣的主题，包括政治。在线媒体对新闻帖子的评论就是一个很好的例子。最初的理论贡献引起人们对这些空间建立健康（公民和参与性）公共领域的潜力的关注，在政治对话和审议过程中更加深入（Fung，Gilman和Shkabatur，2013； Lilleker和Jackson，2008）。 ； O'Reilly，2005； Stromer-Galley＆Wichowski，2011）。极化已被配置为上述对话质量的一个恒定特征，特别是在地中海国家（极化的多元化主义者的情况）。目前的研究挑战之一与新闻报道引发的政治审议中的两极分化审查有关。本文的目的是从日益流行的YouTube网络中的两极分化角度分析政治对话，该网络呈现出非常独特的特征。我们使用了将近40万条有关各种主题（气候变化，加泰罗尼亚危机和政党的选举广告）的评论，我们提出了一种自动化的方法来衡量两极分化。我们的假设是评论的数量（定量变量）与两极化（定性变量）成正相关。我们还将在考试中提供有关报纸的意识形态编辑专栏的信息，正在讨论的主题类型，我们提出了一个索引，用于（1）测量每个评论的极化程度，并使用它来显示该值随时间的变化情况；（2）使用每个视频评论的平均极化来验证假设。