Arbeitsbereich: Political Science

Prof. Dr. Thomas Poguntke

21. November 2022

Prof. Dr. Thomas Poguntke has held the Chair of Comparative Politics at HHU-Düsseldorf since 2010 and is co-director of the Düsseldorf Party Research Institute PRuF. His research interests include the comparative analysis of political parties. In this context, he is coordinating with Susan Scarrow (Houston) and Paul Webb (Sussex) a longitudinal study of political parties in more than 50 countries (https://www.politicalpartydb.org).

Within DIID, he will work primarily on issues of digitized intra-party democracy and digital campaigning.

Prof. Dr. Thomas Winzen

24. October 2022

Thomas Winzen is Professor of European Politics and International Relations at HHU-Düsseldorf.

His research topics include differentiated European integration, the impact of democratic backsliding on European Union institutions and decision-making, the role of parliaments in European and international politics, and the organization and practice of global Internet governance.

Prof. Dr. Stefan Marschall

12. March 2018

Prof. Dr. Stefan Marschall has held the Chair of Political Science II with a focus on “Germany’s Political System” at HHU-Düsseldorf since 2010. His research interests include the consequences of the establishment of the Internet on political communication and decision-making. He is spokesman of the working group “Politics and Communication” of the German Political Science Association.

At the DIID, he is primarily interested in the theoretical foundation, further development and standardization of evaluation criteria and instruments for online participation procedures in different areas of practice.

Dr. Katharina Gerl

12. March 2018

Dr. Katharina Gerl has been a research assistant at DIID at HHU-Düsseldorf since 2016. She studied Political Science (B.A.) at the University of Bremen and Political Communication (M.A.) at HHU-Düsseldorf. For her dissertation at the Chair of Political Science II at Heinrich Heine University, she studied the impact of digital media on political parties as organizations.

Her research interests lie in the areas of effects and acceptance of digital democratic innovations in politics and administration as well as of artificial intelligence for political opinion-forming and decision-making.

Dr. Nadja Wilker

9. March 2018

Nadja Wilker is a research assistant at the Chair of Political Science II at HHU-Düsseldorf. She studied Communication and Political Science (B.A.) in Münster and Political Communication (M.A.) in Düsseldorf. In her master thesis she analyzed participation- and representation-theoretical dimensions of the online-based participation concept of a ‘Liquid Democracy’. In the context of her doctoral thesis she deals with questions of acceptance and legitimacy of online-based participation processes from the perspective of political actors.

Her research and teaching interests lie in the field of political (online) communication and participation in the context of concepts of political representation.

Jun.-Prof. Dr. Tobias Escher

5. March 2018

Tobias Escher leads a BMBF-funded junior research group investigating the effects of participation processes on the quality and legitimacy of political decisions, especially in the context of the transformation to sustainable mobility in the local context. Previously, he supervised the DIID as well as the NRW Forschungskolleg Online-Partizipation at the HHU-Düsseldorf as scientific coordinator. He is a social scientist and holds a PhD from the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford. He can also draw on his basic knowledge of computer science when assessing the possibilities and limits of digitization.

His research focuses on the evaluation of political participation online and offline. In particular, he addresses the question of the extent to which citizen participation contributes to higher quality and legitimacy/acceptance of political decisions. He has developed a teaching module on the theory and practice of online participation, from which, among other things, a project on student participation in teaching has emerged.

Photographer: ©Tilman Schenk