Suchergebnisse

AbstractInternet based technology constitutes one of the most important policy innovations in the last decades. Its diffusion has been rapid, widespread and sustained. The increase has raised questions about its drivers. The article focuses on an aspect of this dynamic that has been neglected so far: the variance between and among democracies and autocracies and their respective subtypes. Moreover, the majority of studies tackles the diffusion of e‐government techniques, excluding the important array of e‐participation. Our analysis thus offers a broader and more differentiated account of the adoption of online tools by governments. The findings indicate that the adoption of e‐government and e‐participation techniques varies substantially between and among democratic and autocratic regime types as well as over time and in kind.

Digitalization is not only a new research subject for political science, but a transformative force for the discipline in terms of teaching and learning as well as research methods and publishing. This volume provides the first account of the influence of digitalization on the discipline of political science including contributions from 20 different countries. It presents a regional stocktaking of the challenges and opportunities of digitalization in most world regions.

Digitalization is not only a new research subject for political science, but a transformative force for the discipline in terms of teaching and learning as well as research methods and publishing. This volume provides the first account of the influence of digitalization on the discipline of political science including contributions from 20 different countries. It presents a regional stocktaking of the challenges and opportunities of digitalization in most world regions. The digital transformation is an example of technological change that will have massive implications for politics and society. It involves a sweeping set of changes that many have likened to the Industrial Revolution. The digital revolution has generated extraordinary opportunities for political scientists, but it also raises serious questions about politics, issues like privacy, regulatory oversight, international conflicts and democracy. Many of these problems are old, but digitalization has magnified their difficulties and importance. The ambivalence of digitalization not only includes multiple aspects for political processes, for communication and for interaction in the political realm, but likewise for our discipline. Digitalization is both a research subject as well as a transformative force for our discipline in terms of teaching and learning, research methods, data collection and management, but also influencing publishing and consultancy.

In recent years, many once stable democracies have experienced various degrees of disruptive communication, along with the erosion of core institutions such as the press, elections, courts, and the rights of citizens. We propose a framework to compare the logics of illiberal and liberal democratic communication and contrast traditionally dominant communication norms of tolerance, civility, responsiveness, and reasoned resolution of differences in liberal democracies with transgressions of those norms by illiberal rightwing movements, parties, leaders, and voters. We suggest that unlike 'counter publics' that seek inclusion in liberal democratic systems, engagement with illiberal communication creates "transgressive publics" that attempt to exclude others in the process of promoting ethnic and religious nationalism. This framework offers a corrective to recent scholarship on democratic public spheres that focuses mainly on why the ideals of more inclusive and egalitarian communication are ever more remote. We shift the focus to the systematic disruptions of mainstream public communication and the authority of public institutions. Our analysis develops a broader theoretical context in which interactions between illiberal leaders and publics occur, with the aim of understanding national variations in how communication systems contribute to democratic erosion.

This introductory article discusses current challenges in quality of democracy research, explains the objectives of this Special Issue, and provides a brief overview of controversies in existing indices that are considered by the contributors to this Special Issue.

The recent decades more than anything else have revealed the ambivalence not only of the articulated expectations about the digital public sphere but also of the 'real' development itself. This thematic issue of Media and Communication highlights some of the criticalities and specificities of the evolution of the public sphere during this period where digital communication ecosystems are becoming increasingly central. The different articles offer a polyphonic perspective and thus contribute significantly to the debate on the transformations of the public sphere, which—in the time of the Covid-19 pandemic—dramatically affect the very essence of our democracy.

The recent decades more than anything else have revealed the ambivalence not only of the articulated expectations about the digital public sphere but also of the "real" development itself. This thematic issue of Media and Communication highlights some of the criticalities and specificities of the evolution of the public sphere during this period where digital communication ecosystems are becoming increasingly central. The different articles offer a polyphonic perspective and thus contribute significantly to the debate on the transformations of the public sphere, which -in the time of the Covid-19 pandemic- dramatically affect the very essence of our democracy.

AbstractThe governments' mitigation measures to fight the COVID-19 pandemic are unprecedented in our post-war history. For overcoming this crisis, citizens were expected to act in compliance with these measures in order to control the spread of the virus and keep public health systems functional. This call for protecting the public health at the same time confronted citizens with several and severe limitations of their democratic freedoms and rights: confinement, restriction on freedoms of movement, religion, specific provisions for public protest and finally also limitations to the right of education by school closures. This paper analyzes how citizens perceive the threat the COVID-19 pandemic and especially the mitigation measures posed for democracy. We assume that pandemic waves and pandemic fatigue have an impact on the perception of threat. To see the overall societal picture, we exploit a large-scale archive of online discourse on Twitter out of which we extract democracy-related discourse with the same temporal and geospatial coverage for our investigation. From that data source, we apply computational methods to extract time series data reflecting aggregated opinions and their evolution over time concerned with the correlation of attitudes towards democracy. We them move deeper using a longitudinal panel survey we conducted in November/December 2020, March/April 2021, and July/August 2021. to have a view of the relationship between citizens' socio-economic status and basic political attitudes. Our multi-method analysis bases on the German case and covers the period from December 2020 to August 2021.