Open Access-Publikationen

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Auflistung Open Access-Publikationen nach Forschungsbereichen "Demokratie – Partizipation – Öffentlichkeit"

Gerade angezeigt 1 - 20 von 74
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    Anti‐elitism in the European Radical Right in Comparative Perspective
    (2023) Vaughan, Michael; Heft, Annett
    To better understand the communication of anti-elitism in contemporary politics, this study conceptually differentiates between specific anti-elitism geared toward specific, materially powerful elites (‘Angela Merkel’) and general anti-elitism referencing broader discursive constructs (‘the elite’). The study analyses the online communications of radical right parties in the 2019 European Parliament elections from six countries (Germany, France, Italy, Austria, Poland and Sweden). This more fine-grained analysis of anti-elitism highlights some areas of transnational convergence, such as a tendency to focus on specific political elites, rather than other sectors such as the media or discursive constructs. The findings also reveal stratification according to parties’ position in national power structures: opposition parties tend to target national-level elites while governing parties focus on the European level. The findings highlight that anti-elitism is used in a highly instrumental way, and help us to better understand the intersection between anti-elitism and the multilevel politics of EP elections.
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    Anything Goes? Youth, News, and Democratic Engagement in the Roaring 2020s
    (2022) Ohme, Jakob; Andersen, Kim; Albæk, Erik; De Vreese, Claes H.
    In the modern world, every person will come of age in a future that is hard to foresee. However, the way citizens born today will navigate their future world will be affected by the context and the institutions that structure the world of their young life. Maybe more importantly than ever, the technologies and the information environment they grow up with shape the ways in which today’s youngsters are socialised into the political world. Youth is a reference point that can reveal two important things: the past years of a cohort's development and an outlook into the future. Every generation is specifically shaped by their formative years which in turn will influence the society in which they come of age, once they enter the job market and end up in positions of responsibility and decision-making power.
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    Avoiding the news to participate in society? The longitudinal relationship between news avoidance and civic engagement
    (2022) Ohme, Jakob; de Bruin, Kiki; de Haan, Yael; Kruikemeier, Sanne; Van Der Meer, Toni G. L. A.; Vliegenthart, Rens
    Lower levels of news use are generally understood to be associated with less political engagement among citizens. But while some people simply have a low preference for news, others avoid the news intentionally. So far little is known about the relationship between active news avoidance and civic engagement in society, a void this study has set out to fill. Based on a four-wave general population panel survey in the Netherlands, conducted between April and July 2020 (N = 1,084) during a crisis situation, this research-in-brief investigates the development of news avoidance and pro-social civic engagement over time. Results suggest that higher news topic avoidance results in higher levels of civic engagement. The study discusses different explanations for why less news can mean more engagement.
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    Bot, or not? Comparing three methods for detecting social bots in five political discourses
    (2021) Martini, Franziska; Samula, Paul; Keller, Tobias R; Klinger, Ulrike
    Social bots – partially or fully automated accounts on social media platforms – have not only been widely discussed, but have also entered political, media and research agendas. However, bot detection is not an exact science. Quantitative estimates of bot prevalence vary considerably and comparative research is rare. We show that findings on the prevalence and activity of bots on Twitter depend strongly on the methods used to identify automated accounts. We search for bots in political discourses on Twitter, using three different bot detection methods: Botometer, Tweetbotornot and “heavy automation”. We drew a sample of 122,884 unique user Twitter accounts that had produced 263,821 tweets contributing to five political discourses in five Western democracies. While all three bot detection methods classified accounts as bots in all our cases, the comparison shows that the three approaches produce very different results. We discuss why neither manual validation nor triangulation resolves the basic problems, and conclude that social scientists studying the influence of social bots on (political) communication and discourse dynamics should be careful with easy-to-use methods, and consider interdisciplinary research.
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    BRAT Rapid Annotation Tool
    (2022) Strippel, Christian; Laugwitz, Laura; Paasch-Colberg, Sünje; Esau, Katharina; Heft, Annett
    In the context of interdisciplinary collaboration, especially with colleagues from computer science, communication and media research has for some time been confronted with a wide range of research software with which it has had little prior experience. In addition to programming languages such as Python or R, these include specific tools for text analysis that represent an alternative to previous variants of computer-assisted content analysis. With the brat rapid annotation tool (BRAT) we present such an alternative in this paper and review it against the background of our experience in using it. BRAT is a web-based open-source text annotation tool that was developed by an international team of computer scientists about ten years ago. The article introduces the tool and its most important features, presents examples for its use in qualitative and quantitative content analyses on the basis of three case studies, and finally evaluates it with regard to potentials and difficulties for the field.
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    Can Intergroup Contact in Virtual Reality (VR) Reduce Stigmatization Against People with Schizophrenia?
    (2021) Stelzmann, Daniela; Toth, Roland; Schieferdecker, David
    People with mental disorders such as schizophrenia do not only suffer from the symptoms of their disorders but also from the stigma attached to it. Although direct intergroup contact is an effective tool to reduce stigmatization, it is rare in real life and costly to be established in interventions, and the success of traditional media campaigns is debatable. We propose Virtual Reality (VR) as a low-threshold alternative for establishing contact since it involves less barriers for affected and unaffected persons. In a 2 + 1 experiment (n = 114), we compared the effects of encounters with a person with schizophrenia through a VR video with contact through a regular video and no contact at all on anxiety, empathy, social proximity, and benevolence towards people with schizophrenia. We found that contact via VR reduced stigmatization only for participants who liked the person encountered. Our data suggest that it is crucial how participants evaluate the person that they encounter and that stronger perception of spatial presence during reception plays an important role, too. Therefore, we discussvarious boundary conditions that need to be considered in VR interventions and future research on destigmatization towards mental disorders, especially schizophrenia.
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    Challenges and Perspectives of Hate Speech Research
    (Böhland & Schremmer, 2023) Strippel, Christian; Paasch-Colberg, Sünje; Emmer, Martin; Trebbe, Joachim
    This book is the result of a conference that could not take place. It is a collection of 26 texts that address and discuss the latest developments in international hate speech research from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives. This includes case studies from Brazil, Lebanon, Poland, Nigeria, and India, theoretical introductions to the concepts of hate speech, dangerous speech, incivility, toxicity, extreme speech, and dark participation, as well as reflections on methodological challenges such as scraping, annotation, datafication, implicity, explainability, and machine learning. As such, it provides a much-needed forum for cross-national and cross-disciplinary conversations in what is currently a very vibrant field of research.
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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.
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    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.
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    Der digitale Strukturwandel von Öffentlichkeit: Demokratietheoretische Anmerkungen
    (Nomos, 2022) Thiel, Thorsten; Spiecker Gen. Döhmann, Indra; Westland, Michael; Campos, Ricardo
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    Der digitale Wandel der Wissenschaftskommunikation
    (Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2021) Neuberger, Christoph; Weingart, Peter; Fähnrich, Birte; Fecher, Benedikt; Schäfer, Mike S.; Schmid-Petri, Hannah; Wagner, Gert G.
    Mit der Digitalisierung der Wissenschaftskommunikation verbindet sich eine Vielzahl neuer Kommunikationsformen und Partizipationsmöglichkeiten, die das Verhältnis von Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft grundlegend verändern. In diesem Band wird ein Theorierahmen entwickelt, der hilft, diese Veränderungen anhand konkreter Beispiele wie Open Science, Plagiats-Wikis oder Wissens-Communities einzuordnen, Forschungsbefunde zu systematisieren und auf offene Fragen hinzuweisen. Die Autorinnen und Autoren waren Mitglieder der Interdisziplinären Arbeitsgruppe „Implikationen der Digitalisierung für die Qualität der Wissenschaftskommunikation“ (2018-2021).
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    Der digitale Wandel der Wissensordnung. Theorierahmen für die Analyse von Wahrheit, Wissen und Rationalität in der öffentlichen Kommunikation
    (2019) Neuberger, Christoph; Bartsch, Anne; Reinemann, Carsten; Fröhlich, Romy; Hanitzsch, Thomas; Schindler, Johanna
    Populäre Krisendiagnosen zur Verbreitung von Falschinformationen, zur Erosion einer gemeinsamen Wissensbasis und zur Infragestellung epistemischer Autoritäten haben in den letzten Jahren nicht nur Sorgen um die Wissensordnung in liberalen Demokratien ausgelöst, sondern auch zu erheblichen Forschungsaktivitäten in der Kommunikationswissenschaft geführt. Allerdings steht eine Integration der empirischen Befunde zu den zahlreichen Einzelaspekten in einen Theorierahmen noch aus. Der Zweck eines solchen Rahmens besteht darin, den digitalen Wandel der Genese, Prüfung, Distribution und Aneignung von Wissen in der medienöffentlichen Kommunikation systematisch zu beschreiben und zu erklären. Ausgehend von den Grundbegriffen Wahrheit, Wissen und Rationalität wird ein Modell der Wissensordnung entwickelt, das Phasen, Kontexte, Hierarchiestufen und Rollen unterscheidet. Das Internet tendiert zur Auflösung der bisherigen Wissensordnung, d. h. zu einem Kollaps der Kontexte, zur Nivellierung der epistemischen Hierarchie, zur Auflösung der Phasenfolge des Wissensprozesses, zum offenen Zugang zu bislang exklusiven Rollen und zur Entstehung von Hybridrollen. Es wird demonstriert, wie das Modell zur Aufarbeitung des Forschungsstands, zur Ableitung einer Forschungsagenda und für Gestaltungsempfehlungen eingesetzt werden kann
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    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.
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    Die Digitalisierung von Lebensstilpolitik. Wie Soziale Medien lebensstilpolitisches Engagement prägen
    (2021) Leißner, Laura
    Political participation is fundamentally changing under the influence of digital media. While this dynamic has already been intensively researched for election campaigns and protest movements, alternative forms of political participation embedded in everyday life are rarely the focus of communication studies. This paper theorizes the concept of lifestyle politics as a form of political participation and discusses the interplay between lifestyle politics and social media. It begins with the argument that lifestyle politics is systematically defined along the categories of intention and field of action and then further differentiated along the categories of action strategy and action frame. Along these lines, previous research and other case studies are used to discuss the ways in which social media shape and influence various forms of lifestyle politics. The study shows that on the one hand, social media reduce information and participation costs and, as a consequence, support the engagement in lifestyle politics. On the other hand, social media expand the repertoire of lifestyle politics by affording-unlike ever media forms in the past-the technical infrastructure for the exercise of persuasive and collectively oriented lifestyle politics.
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    “Digital citizenship” revisited: the impact of ICTs on citizens’ political communication beyond the Western state
    (2018) Emmer, Martin; Kunst, Marlene
    The role of ICTs in political participation has been a core topic in political communication research for about two decades. Numerous studies have tested whether the enthusiasm about the mobilizing impact of ICTs holds true. Most have been conducted in Western countries and, therefore, reflect a Western-centric understanding of politics and participation. Although these studies have provided insight into the potential of ICTs for established democracies, political and cultural contexts from developing world regions such as sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) have thus far been neglected. However, given the rapid dissemination of ICTs (e.g., mobile phones) and their innovative application in everyday life in developing countries, regions like SSA should be of particular interest for research in this field. This article aims to highlight the shortcomings of Western research and to recommend adjustments in future efforts to investigate effects of ICTs, including developing world regions, in order to develop a more robust empirical grounding for theories of participation.
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    Digital data donations. A quest for best practices
    (2022) Ohme, Jakob; Araujo, Theo
    This preview article discusses PORT—a data donation software newly developed by Boeschoten et al.—toward the background of three core data donation principles: privacy protection, meaningful data extraction, and securing user agency.
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    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.
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    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.
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    Diskursarchitekturen deutscher Nachrichtenseiten
    (2020) Strippel, Christian; Paasch-Colberg, Sünje; Gehrau, Volker; Waldherr, Annie; Scholl, Armin; Deutsche Gesellschaft Für Publizistik- Und Kommunikationswissenschaft E.V.
    For some years now, news sites around the world are increasingly confronted with abusive user comments in their respective comment sections and discussion forums. While these spaces were long seen as promising instruments of democratic participation, they now have a reputation as spaces full of insults and hate speech. Since this not only poses a threat to social cohesion but can also compromise the image of a news site, many platforms have taken measures to regulate the comments on their sites since then. Some have published community guidelines, hired moderation teams and implemented monitoring software. As an additional measure, many adapted the technological design and the features of their comment spaces to gain more control over the posted comments. This includes, for example, requiring commenters to register with the site, sorting of comment threads and various degrees of anonymization. Many authors refer to this technological design of comment spaces as “discourse architecture.” The theoretical argument behind this term is that the way comment spaces are “built” influences how commenters behave within them. This perspective is particularly interesting from the point of view of journalism research, since the relationship between editorial staff and audience is manifested in such technological architectures. Several studies have analyzed and compared various discourse architectures in order to investigate possible effects on commenting behavior. However, there is still a lack of a systematic analysis in this field. Apart from individual case studies, there are no findings on the diversity of discourse architectures which provide information on the technical conditions of audience participation on the Internet. On the theoretical basis of the discourse architecture approach, this study investigates two research questions: How are the included discourse architectures designed (RQ1)? And what types of discourse architectures can we identify (RQ2)? In order to answer these questions, we conducted a standardized analysis of 361 German news sites, which produced three key findings. Firstly, with regard to RQ1, we found that 173 of these 361 news sites offer comments sections, whereas only 24 offer discussion forums. In contrast, almost all sites in the sample have an additional Facebook page. Although we have not checked whether these pages actually contain posts and comments, against this background we can nevertheless assume that the discourse architecture of Facebook has become the most important technological infrastructure for commenting news articles in Germany. Acknowledging the low deliberative quality of user discussions on Facebook revealed by earlier studies, this would be quite problematic with regard to social integration. Secondly, the detailed analysis of the comment sections showed that most news sites do not exhaust the possibilities of using technical discourse architectures to gain more control over the discussions of users and users. Overall, the technological design of the comment sections is quite inclusive, not very restrictive and only weakly regulated. The most popular features are required registration, rating of comments, opprtunities to report comments and the restriction of comment sections to certain topics. Thirdly, with regard to RQ2, five distinct types of discourse architectures for comment sections could be identified within the sample. They differ in terms of their combinations of features and as well as in terms of their outreach. Additionally, we found a significant correlation between the outreach of the news sites and the number of features that strengthen editorial control over the comments.