thank you so much for finding my JoC article interesting and for offering your insights on it! tim and steveo, thank you also for suggesting the other articles on stormfront and on the majority/minority status!

apologizing for self-promotion, below is a list of other publications (or forthcoming pieces) that may be perhaps of interest to you, as they revolve precisely around political discussion and disagreement, attitude polarization, extreme online groups, public opinion perception (a 2008 POQ piece also based on the same data) and mobilization to action. i will happily share them with you.

again, thank you, have a great weekend and i look forward your further comments

magdalena

Wojcieszak, M. (in press). Deliberation Reconsidered: What happens when people with extreme views encounter disagreement. Journal of Communication.

Wojcieszak, M., Baek, Y. M., & Delli Carpini, M. (in press). Deliberative and Participatory Democracy? Ideological Strength and the Processes Leading from Deliberation to Political Engagement. International Journal of Public Opinion Research.

Wojcieszak, M. & Price, V. (in press). Bridging the Divide or Intensifying the Conflict? How Disagreement Affects Strong Predilections about Sexual Minorities. Political Psychology.

Wojcieszak, M. (2010). “Don’t Talk to Me”- Effects of Ideologically Homogeneous Online Groups and Politically Dissimilar Offline Ties on Extremism. New Media & Society. First published online at http://nms.sagepub.com/cgi/rapidpdf/1461444809342775v1

Baek, Y. M. & Wojcieszak, M. (2009). Don’t Expect Too Much! Relationship between Learning from Late-Night Comedy and Knowledge Item Difficulty. Communication Research, 36, 783-809.

Wojcieszak, M., Baek, Y. M., & Delli Carpini, M. (2009). What is really going on: Structure Underlying Online and Face to Face Deliberation. Information, Communication and Society, 12, 1080 – 1102.

Wojcieszak, M. (2009). Carrying Online Participation Offline: Mobilization by Radical Online Groups and Politically Dissimilar Offline Ties. Journal of Communication, 59 (3), 564-586.

Wojcieszak, M. & Mutz, D. (2009). Online Groups and Political Discourse: Do Online Discussion Spaces Facilitate Exposure to Political Disagreement? Journal of Communication, 59(1), 40-56.

Wojcieszak, M. & Price, V. (2009). What Underlies the False Consensus Effect? How Personal Opinion and Disagreement Affect Public Opinion Perception. International Journal of Public Opinion Research, 21, 25-46.

Wojcieszak, M. (2008). False Consensus Goes Online: Impact of Ideologically Homogeneous Online Groups on False Consensus. Public Opinion Quarterly 72(4):781-791.

Thanks for let us know about this article… it seems like a good reading.

Regarding your quote : “If the study’s findings generalize, then radicals are perhaps most likely to mobilize as a result of online participation when they are in a social milieu that contains a lot of political diversity”… I would advise you if can to get this article: Dale T. Miller a, Kimberly Rios Morrison, “Expressing deviant opinions: Believing you are in the majority help”, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 45 (2009) 740–747

I think that what is important for radicalisation is a mix bewteen: 1) being in a social milieu that contains a lot of political diversity and 2) believing that in fact you are part of the majority…

I think more research should be done about diversity being/majority believing…

Steveo

You might also be interested in this recent article: Lorraine Grieve, ‘Exploring “Stormfront”: A Virtual Community of the Radical Right’, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, Vol.32, No.11 (Nov 2009), pp.989-1007 [link]