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Civic Hackathons und der Formwandel der Demokratie. Eine repräsentationstheoretische Analyse von #WirVsVirus
(2021) Berg, Sebastian; Clute-Simon, Veza; Freudl, Rebecca-Lea; Rakowski, Niklas; Thiel, Thorsten
The article deals with the case of the civic hackathon #WirVsVirus, which was organised in reaction to the corona pandemic and officially endorsed by the federal government. It aims at discussing the normative implications of this technologically oriented political format. How are different social representation claims formulated and negotiated in and through civic hackathons? Our analysis shows that the hackathon constitutes a successful representative claim on behalf of civic tech initiatives vis-à-vis the administrative state. While this claim is primarily about establishing a new format for efficient and subsidiary problem solving in the wake of the crisis, the hackathon’s participatory promises are only partially fulfilled. The hackathon was rather open towards input from civil society and in this way attracted a great deal of public interest. Despite this fact, due to its technological-organizational structure and its competitive, solution-oriented procedure, decision-making power remains largely with the hackathon’s organizers.
Das Ende des Politischen? Demokratische Politik und Künstliche Intelligenz
(2022) Koster, Ann-Kathrin
In jüngster Zeit findet innerhalb der politiktheoretischen Forschung eine vermehrte Auseinandersetzung mit algorithmenbasierten Systemen statt. Diese ist geprägt von der Behauptung einer neuen algorithmischen Regierungsweise, die aufgrund ihrer reduktionistisch-formalen Logik sowohl plurale Sinnzusammenhänge untergräbt als auch die individuelle Entfaltung reflexiver Urteilsbildung unterminiert. Entgegen dieser Annahmen argumentiert der vorliegende Beitrag, dass der Einsatz dieser digitalen Technologien im politischen Kontext nicht zwangsläufig in eine post-politische Verfasstheit von Gesellschaft münden muss. Algorithmische Systeme lassen sich als spezifische epistemische Verfahren verstehen, deren operativer Gebrauch symbolischer Inputs zwar einer schließenden, ontologisierenden Logik folgt und für sich genommen kontingenzreduzierende und latent anti-politische Wirkungen zeitigt. Demokratische Gesellschaften zeichnen sich aber hinsichtlich ihrer kontingenztheoretischen Verfahren gerade dadurch aus, dass ihre befragende Logik eine Inkorporation solcher Ontologisierungen ermöglicht. Es geht dann vielmehr darum, die Bedingungen ihrer Politisierung in den Blick zu nehmen.
Die digitale Konstellation. Eine Positionsbestimmung
(2020) Berg, Sebastian; Rakowski, Niklas; Thiel, Thorsten
The emergence of the digital society has become one of the most pressing research topics in social science. So far political science has been at the margins of the debate being restricted by a rather narrow focus on networked communications. The paper attempts to change this by presenting a more encompassing way to thematize digitalization from within political science. After briefly having criticized the research development in political science the paper reconstructs at length some of the most popular conceptualizations in neighboring disciplines. While we highlight the commonalities and strengths of those approaches in theorizing digitalization, we criticize their rather derivative understanding of democratic practices and the political as such. We go on to propose a modified understanding—labeled the “digital constellation”—that looks at the changing shape of democracy by developing a much more nuanced understanding of the interplay of societies and technology. Finally, the argument is illustrated by a short exemplary analysis of the changes occurring in political representation in the context of digitalization.
Digital democracy
(2021) Berg, Sebastian; Hofmann, Jeanette
For contemporary societies, digital democracy provides a key concept that denotes, in our understanding, the relationship between collective self-government and mediating digital infrastructures. New forms of digital engagement that go hand in hand with organisational reforms are re-intermediating established democratic settings in open-ended ways that defy linear narratives of demise or renewal. As a first approach, we trace the history of digital democracy against the background of its specific media constellations, describing continuities and discontinuities in the interplay of technological change and aspirations for democratisation. Thereafter, we critically review theoretical premises concerning the role of technology and how they vary in the way the concept of digital democracy is deployed. In four domains, we show the contingent political conditions under which the relationship between forms of democratic selfdetermination and its mediating digital infrastructures evolve. One lesson to learn from these four domains is that democratic self-governance is a profoundly mediated project whose institutions and practices are constantly in flux.
Digital sovereignty
(2020) Pohle, Julia; Thiel, Thorsten
Over the last decade, digital sovereignty has become a central element in policy discourses on digital issues. Although it has become popular in both centralised/authoritarian and democratic countries alike, the concept remains highly contested. After investigating the challenges to sovereignty apparently posed by the digital transformation, this essay retraces how sovereignty has re-emerged as a key category with regard to the digital. By systematising the various normative claims to digital sovereignty, it then goes on to show how, today, the concept is understood more as a discursive practice in politics and policy than as a legal or organisational concept.
Four Parameters for Measuring Democratic Deliberation: Theoretical and Methodological Challenges and How to Respond
(2018) Fleuß, Dannica; Helbig, Karoline; Schaal, Gary S.
Although measuring democratic deliberation is necessary for a valid measurement of the performance of democracies, it poses serious theoretical and methodological challenges. The most serious problem in the context of research on democratic performance is the need for a theoretical and methodological approach for “upscaling” the measurement of deliberation from the micro and meso level to the macro level. The systemic approach offers a useful framework for this purpose. Building on this framework, this article offers a modular approach consisting of four parameters for conceptualization, measurement, and aggregation which can be adjusted to make the measurement of democratic deliberation compatible with the various general measurement approaches adopted by different scholars.
Mediated democracy – Linking digital technology to political agency
(2019) Hofmann, Jeanette
Although the relationship between digitalisation and democracy is subject of growing public attention, the nature of this relationship is rarely addressed in a systematic manner. The common understanding is that digital media are the driver of the political change we are facing today. This paper argues against such a causal approach und proposes a co-evolutionary perspective instead. Inspired by Benedict Anderson's "Imagined Communities" and recent research on mediatisation, it introduces the concept of mediated democracy. This concept reflects the simple idea that representative democracy requires technical mediation, and that the rise of modern democracy and of communication media are therefore closely intertwined. Hence, mediated democracy denotes a research perspective, not a type of democracy. It explores the changing interplay of democratic organisation and communication media as a contingent constellation, which could have evolved differently. Specific forms of communication media emerge in tandem with larger societal formations and mutually enable each other. Following this argument, the current constellation reflects a transformation of representative democracy and the spread of digital media. The latter is interpreted as a "training ground" for experimenting with new forms of democratic agency.
Political Opinion Formation as Epistemic Practice. The Hashtag Assemblage of #metwo
(2020) Berg, Sebastian; König, Tim; Koster, Ann-Kathrin
The article contributes to the literature on the political use of hashtags. We argue that hashtag assemblages could be understood in the tradition of representing public opinion through datafication in the context of democratic politics. While traditional data-based epistemic practices like polls lead to the ‘passivation’ of citizens, in the digital constellation this tendency is currently challenged. In media like Twitter, hashtags serve as a technical operator to order the discursive fabrication of diverse publicly articulated opinions that manifest in the assemblage of tweets, algorithms and criticisms. We conceptualize such a critical public as an epistemic sensorium for dislocations based on the expression of experienced social imbalances and its political amplification. On the level of opinion formation, this constitutes a process of democratization, allowing for the expression of diverse opinions and issues even under singular hashtags. Despite this diversity, we see a strong tendency of publicly relevant actors such as news outlets to represent digital forms of opinion expression as unified movements. We argue that this tendency can partly be explained by the affordances of networked media, relating the process of objectification to the network position of the observer. We make this argument empirically plausible by applying methods of network analysis and topic modelling to a dataset of 196,987 tweets sampled via the hashtag #metwo that emerged in the German Twittersphere in the summer of 2018 and united a discourse concerned with racism and identity. In light of this data, we not only demonstrate the hashtag assemblage’s heterogeneity and potential for subaltern agency; we also make visible how hashtag assemblages as epistemic practices are inherently dynamic, distinguishing it from opinion polling through the limited observational capacities and active participation of the actors representing its claims within the hybrid media system.
Political Theory of the Digital Constellation
(2022) Berg, Sebastian; Staemmler, Daniel; Thiel, Thorsten
The introductory contribution to this special issue on “Political Theory of the Digital Constellation” addresses the conditions and possibilities of political the- ory’s engagement with digital developments. The motivation for this inquiry is the growing interest in questions of political theory arising from the digital transforma- tion, as well as the acknowledgement that digitalisation not only changes politics, but conversely that politics also shapes digitalisation. The article identifies three pitfalls of previous engagement: The narrowing of the subject of “digitalisation” to the topic of the “internet” and, thereby, to the aspect of communication, the disre- gard for the technicality of the digital, and the insufficient recognition that (digital) technology is political. To avoid these pitfalls, the research perspective of the digi- tal constellation is presented. The digital constellation serves as an epistemological guide that helps to structure theoretical reflection on the interrelationship between digitalisation and political questions. Ultimately, the outlines of the political theory in the digital constellation become clear in the fourteen contributions of the special volume, which are presented in conclusion.
Social Media and the Digital Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere
(2022) Staab, Philipp; Thiel, Thorsten
This article explores the question of how to understand social media following the Habermasian theory of the structural transformation of the public sphere. We argue for a return to political-economic fundamentals as the basis for analysing the public sphere and seek to establish a characteristic connection between digital-behavioural control and singularised audiences in the context of proprietary markets. In the digital constellation, it is less a matter of immobilising the citizen as a consumer but rather of their political activation – albeit in conditions under which commercial interests have primacy: privatisation without privatism.
Towards platform observability
(2020) Rieder, Bernhard; Hofmann, Jeanette
The growing power of digital platforms raises the question of democratic control or at least containment. In light of the transforming impact of platforms on markets, the public sphere, elections, and employment conditions, governments, and civil society alike are demanding more transparency and accountability. Shedding light on the principles and practices of algorithmic ordering promises to limit the power of platforms by subjecting their hidden operations to regulatory inspection. This article questions the popular image of an openable ‘black box’. Based on a critical reflection on transparency as a panacea for curtailing platform power, we propose the concept of observability to deal more systematically with the problem of studying complex algorithmic systems. We set out three broad principles as regulatory guidelines for making platforms more accountable. These principles concern the normative and analytical scope, the empirical and temporal dimension, and the necessary capacities for learning and knowledge generation.
Widerstand und die Formierung von Ordnung in der digitalen Konstellation
(2020) Berg, Sebastian; Thiel, Thorsten
Wird digitaler Widerstand in der Politischen Theorie zum Thema, so meist mit einem Fokus auf (neue) Formen zivilen Ungehorsams wie Hacktivismus. Der Aufsatz bietet hierzu eine Alternative, indem er das Betrachtungsfeld so ausweitet, dass neben diesen Formen auch Strategien des netzpolitischen Protests und der Schaffung alternativen Infrastrukturen in den Blick genommen werden. Die systematisierende und vergleichende Analyse der Entwicklung von Widerstandsformen in der digitalen Konstellation erlaubt es, die Dynamik des Zusammenwirkens von Ordnung und Widerstand besser zu verstehen. Hieraus erwächst eine Kritik der Formierung von Herrschaft in der Gegenwart, welche die depolitisierende Restrukturierung von Handlungsund Möglichkeitsräumen für gesellschaftliche Akteur*innen im Umgang mit digitaler Technik herausarbeitet, was eine politiktheoretische Ergänzung der Kritik von Überwachungspotentialen und Privatisierungstendenzen erzeugt.

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Auflistung Aufsätze nach Forschungsgruppen "Demokratie und Digitalisierung"

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