People

Prof. Dr. Frank Bätge is professor at the University of Applied Sciences for Public Administration North Rhine-Westphalia. He is also a lecturer at the German University of Admini-
strative Sciences in Speyer and at the NRW School of Governance at the University of Duisburg-Essen. Prior to his appointment as professor, he held a leading position in local government.

His research interests lie in the field of municipal law and the law of political participation in the form of elections, decisions by citizens and informal forms of participation. In this context, he is particularly interested in legal questions of online participation and e-demcracy. He was consulted by parliaments as an expert. Prof. Dr. Bätge has written various publications and reports on these fields. He is editor of the journal named municipal electoral practice and the scientific publication series named Special Administrative Law.

Jun.-Prof. Dr. Dorothea Baumeister is a junior professor for computational social choice at Heinrich-Heine-University in Düsseldorf. Since 2017 she leads the DFG-project “Distances in Voting”.

In her research she concentrates on the axiomatic and computa tionalan  alysis of problems from the field of preference aggregation, votingsystems, and fair division. At the DIID her focus lies on the mathematical formalization of processes in online participation and theinfluence of distances in online voting.

Marike Bormann is a research assistant at the department of Social Sciences at Heinrich-Heine-University Duesseldorf. She holds a bachelor´s degree in Social Sciences (Communication and Media Studies, Political Science and Sociology) from Heinrich-Heine-University Duesseldorf and a master´s degree in Communication Management from the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Hannover.

As a member of the DIID, her core interests are political online participation and deviant forms of political online communication. In her PhD project, she focuses on incivility in political online communication. Her dissertation is part of an interdisciplinary project which is supported by the Digital Society research program funded by the Ministry of Culture and Science of North Rhine-Westphalia.

Inga Brentel is research associate for media and communication studies at the social science institut of Heinrich Heine University Duesseldorf. There she is working on her doctoral degree as part of the tandem-project ‘audience and market fragmentation online’ together with Céline Fabienne Lücken working at the business studies department of the University of Applied Sciences Düsseldorf. She studied political science at the University of Mannheim (B.A.) and political communication at the Heinrich Heine University Duesseldorf (M.A.). In her master thesis, she was concentrating on electoral coverage and its determinants.

With her dissertation, she is looking at audience fragmentation online, its determinants as well as its consequences for democracies. Regarding the DIID she is mainly interested in the attention of users to different media channels online. Thereby, political information channels and programs are focused.

Stefan Conrad is full professor in computer science at Heinrich Heine University in Duesseldorf since 2002.  He has a chair for databases and information systems.  Since 2015 he is member of the Academic Senate of the Heinrich Heine University.

His research considers the analysis of large data sets, in particular, he is interested in image retrieval, the analysis of large time series, clustering, and text mining.  He has on-going cooperations with industrial partners.  Several of these cooperations were funded by the BMWi (Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy) in a research and development programme for small and medium enterprises. These projects dealt with opinion mining (sentiment analysis), extraction of product features relevant for users, and automated text summarization. At DIID his research interest is currently focused on automated topic extraction and content analyses of texts as well as identifying argument structures, sentiments, and emotions.

Mario Datts is research assistant at the graduate school Linkages in Democracy (LinkDe) at the Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf since 2015. He studied political science at the Leibniz University Hannover (B.A.) and at the Freie Universität Berlin (M.A.).

In his master´s thesis he analyzed democratic processes within the German Pirate Party. The key issue discussed in this study centered around factors influencing the use of an internal participatory system (LiquidFeedback). His PhD project is on Online Participation include the usage of online media (especially the usage of social media) by various political actors. Therefor he developed a program which captures the communication on facebook automatically and prepares it for social science analysis.

Prof. Dr. Frank Dietrich holds the chair of Practical Philosophy at the Heinrich Heine University Duesseldorf since 2012.

His research interests are political philosophy, legal philosophy and ethics. As part of the DIID, he deals with the democratic-theoretical legitimation of online participation processes and the protection of privacy.

Prof. Dr. Martin Mauve is heading the chair for computer networks and communication systems at the Heinrich Heine University Duesseldorf. Since 2015 he is also dean of the faculty for mathematics and natural sciences at the same university.

His research interests include secure and robust distributed systems, computer supported collaborative work and online participation. A special focus of his work is on scalable support for discussions and decision making. In the context of the DIID he is particularly interested in novel concepts for dialog-based online-participation and its technical realization.

Prof. Dr. Stefan Marschall is a full professor of political science and Chair of the division Political Science II at the Department of Social Sciences of Heinrich Heine University Duesseldorf. He is a specialist on the political system of Germany, on comparative as well as transnational parliamentarism and especially on political (online) com-
munication and participation. Since 2012, Stefan Marschall is the speaker of the section “Politics and Communication” of the German Political Science Association (DVPW). Moreover, Stefan Marschall is head of the Duesseldorf Research Centre on the German Voting Advice Application “Wahl-O-Mat” and responsible for the development and implementation of the “lokal-o-mat”.

A further research focus of Stefan Marschall relating to the social and political dimensions of internet is documented by his works on political online-participation. Since 2016 he is partner in the Horizon 2020 Twinning Project Network for Social Computing Research – NOTRE (TWINN – 2015, http://notre.socialcomputing.eu/). Additionally, he is one of the Principal Investigators and Member of the Board of the Institute for Internet and Democracy (www.diid.hhu.de) as well as of the Graduate School “Online Participation”. For the DIID he serves as one of the two Deputy Speakers. He has conducted and published several studies on the use of online-based participation platforms within parties and parliaments in the last years.

Prof. Dr. Michael Baurmann is a Senior Professor for Sociology at the University of Duesseldorf. He studied sociology, philosophy and law. He has been visiting professor in Australia (ANU), Mexico (ITAM) and the United States (NYU) and was senior research fellow at the Alfried Krupp Wissenschaftskolleg in Greifswald in 2009 and 2013. He is the current Managing Director of the DIID.

His main research interests are general theory of sociology, rational choice theory, social epistemology, and the epistemic dimensions of democracy. At the DIID he is interested in inovative systems for online deliberation and argumentation.

Prof. Dr. Christiane Eilders has been a professor for communication and media studies at the Heinrich Heine University Duesseldorf since 2011. She is a member of the DFG research group “Political Communication in the Online-World”.

Her research deals with public discourses and public opinion formation and puts a focus on the role of established mass media and online-communication.
Within the DIID, her interest lies in the deliberative quality and the different types of processes in online-discourses in the realm of political participation.

Katharina Esau is a research associate at the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Düsseldorf. She studied Social Sciences (Communication Science, Political Science and Sociology) (B.A.) and Political Communication (M.A.) in Düsseldorf.

Her research interests include online participation and deliberation, different forms of communication (argum-
entation, narration, emotional expression, humor) and the emergence of public opinion online. As part of the DIID, she is interested in online deliberation processes, automated analyses of online discussions (argument and emotion mining) and deliberative design of online discussions.

Tobias Escher is a postdoctoral research fellow who manages both the Düsseldorf Institute for Internet and Democracy (DIID) and the PhD programme on local level online participation (NRW Forschungskolleg) of Heinrich-Heine-University Duesseldorf. His research interests are the design and evaluation of participatory processes online and offline. His particular focus is the potential contribution of citizen participation for increasing the quality and legitimacy/acceptance of political decisions. He has also developed a course on the theory and practice of online participation, a result of which has been a platform allowing students to shape their course curricula.

Tobias Escher is a social scientist with a PhD in Information Science, Communication Studies and the Social Sciences from the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford. To asses the opportunities as well as the limitations of digital technologies he can also rely on his basic knowledge of Computer Science. Having previously worked and studied in Oxford, London, Leicester and Berlin, he joined Heinrich Heine University Duesseldorf in 2011.

Dennis Frieß is a research associate at the Social Science Department at the University of Düsseldorf. He holds a Bachelor degree in Political Sciences, Social Sciences and Communications from the University of Erfurt and a Master in Political Communication from the University of Düsseldorf. He graduated in 2014 with a master’s thesis on the “Empirical analysis of online deliberation processes”.

His research interests are political (online) communication, online deliberation and e-participation. As a member of the DIID he is interested online deliberation and democracy-related expectations that are associated with e-participation. As a DIID employee he is responsible for public relations and event management. He is elected board member of the DIID.

Katharina Gerl is a postdoctoral researcher at the depart-
ment of Social Sciences at Heinrich Heine University Duesseldorf and at the Düsseldorf Institute for Internet and Democracy (DIID). In her PhD thesis she analyzed the effects of digitalization and mediatization on party organizations in Germany.

Her research focuses on the implications of digital techno-
logies for political institutions, political communication and participation. She conducted several studies evaluating the usage of onlinebased tools by political organizations. At the DIID she is also in charge of the unit that focusses on the evaluation of online public partici-
pation and the development of evaluation criteria to measure and compare the input, output, outcome and impact of digital tools for public participation.

Rabea Gilleßen is a student assistant (WHB) at the DIID. She is studying Political Communication at Heinrich Heine University Duesseldorf. In her Bachelor thesis, she examined the facebook communication of parliament members in NRW. Currently she is working in the field of online-deliberation. At the DIID she is responsible for event management and administrative support.

Junior Professor. Dr.-Ing. Kálmán Graffi has been a junior professor at Heinrich Heine University Duesseldorf since 2012 and heads the working group “Technology of Social Networks” at the Institute of Computer Science.

His research includes investigating new social interaction opportunities over the Internet, as well as new mechanisms and protocols for highly scalable and secure distributed systems. At DIID, his interest lies in the technical basis for secure and robust communication systems in Edge Computing networks under precarious conditions.

Prof. Dr. Susanne Hahn is apl. Professor at the Department of Philosophy at Heinrich Heine University Duesseldorf. Since 2017 she is filling in the professorship of theoretical philosophy. 2017 Susanne Hahn was awarded with the German Prize for Philosophy and Social Ethics of the Max-Uwe-Redler-Stiftung.

Her research focuses lies on rationality, normativity and business ethics. As part of the DIID, she deals with the normative challenges of digitization.

Since March 2018, Dominique Heinbach is a research associate in the junior research group “Deliberative Discussions in the Social Web”, funded by the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, at the Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf. Prior to this, she was a research associate at the Department of Communication at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. She graduated in Communication Studies, Film Studies (B.A.) and Communication and Media Research (M.A.) in Mainz.

Her master’s thesis focused on the long-term effects of media brand and user comments on the persuasiveness of online news articles. Her research interests include political online participation and deliberation as well as media effects and persuasion research in the social web. In her dissertation, she investigates the short- and long-term effects of moderation on the deliberative quality and effects of public online discussions on political issues in the news media. At the DIID, she is especially interested in online deliberation processes and the (automated) analysis of online discussions.

Prof. Dr. Harald Hofmann teaches at the University of Applied Sciences for Public Administration NRW. He is Professor of Law, Administration and Local Self-Government. He was four times advisor to the parliament of the Federal State of North-Rhine-Westphalia, concerning the reforms of the municipal law and participation.

His research concentrates on Political Participation. He is Deputy-Chairman of the “PhD programme Online Partici-
pation” and member of the “Research-group Political Participation FHöV”.

Kimon Kieslich is research associate at the department of Social Sciences at the Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf. He holds a bachelor‘s and master‘s degree in Communication Studies from the Westfälische Wilhelms-University Münster.
His master thesis focussed on the effects of frames in context of media coverage about digitalization. His research interests lie in the field of fear communication as well as societal perceptions of digitalization.

Peter Kotzian studied social science at the University of Mannheim, where he also obtained his Ph.D. After a research internship at the London School of Economics he received his venia docendi for political science at the Technical Uni-
versity of Darmstadt. In 2014 he became senior research assistant at the Chair of Accounting at Heinrich Heine University Duesseldorf.

Dr. Kotzian‘s research interests cover a range of fields: experimental behavioral research, but also comparative institutional analysis, democratization of international governance by inclusion of non-governmental actors. Within the DIID, research projects on the impact of digitalization on individual and collective decision processes in companies are in preparation. Of special interest are issues of business analytics and their impact on entrepreneurial decison-making.

Matthias Liebeck studied computer science and mathe-
matics at the Heinrich Heine University Duesseldorf. In this master’s thesis titled ‘Automated Analysis of Opinion Making by Discussion Tracing in Social Media’, he worked on methods for the automated analysis of topics and tonality of user comments in a German news portal and in an online participation process. As a junior software developer, he gained multiple years of experience in web development with ASP.Net / C# in a local IT company.

His primary research interest is the automated analysis of text content in online participation processes.

Celine Fabienne Lücken is working as a research associate at the business studies department of the University of Applied Sciences Duesseldorf. She is doing her doctor‘s degree as part of the tandem-project ‘audience and market fragmentation online’ together with Inga Brentel from the Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf. She studied communication and multimedia management at the University of Applied Siences Düsseldorf (B.A.) and technology and innovation management at the FOM Düsseldorf (M.Sc.). Within her bachelor thesis, she focused on the discrepancy between governmental data protection actions and its perception within e-administration. In her master thesis, she concentrated on requirements for certification standards within the voluntary offset market.

In her dissertation she is dedicated to the increasing influence of new advertising forms (“programmatic advertising”, “native advertising”) as well as their avoidance (ad blocking technology) on the business models and journalistic functioning of online media. Regarding the DIID, she is particularly interested in the evolving business models of online information offers and their impact on pluralism.

Marco Lünich is research associate at the Social Science Department at the University of Düsseldorf. He holds a Bachelor degree in Communication Science from the University of Erfurt and a Master in Communication Science from the Universiteit van Amsterdam. From 2014-
2017 he researched and taught at the Departement of Communication at the University of Muenster.

His research interests lie in the field of political (online-) communication, media and sports and societal consequences of digitalization and digital media. In his PhD project he focuses on the epistemological perceptions of digitalization, particulary on big data.

Dr. Frank Marcinkowski has joined the Institute for Social Sciences at Heinrich Heine University Duesseldorf as Professor of Communication in October 2017.

His research and teaching areas include communication theories, political communication and online media. At DIID he is interested in public perceptions, evaluation and opinion formation of digitalization.

Christian Meter is research assistant at the Institute of Computer Science and in the working group „Technology of Social Networks“. He studied Computer Science at Heinrich Heine University Duesseldorf between 2010 and 2015.

In his master’s thesis he analyzed electronic voting systems, which are used in political elections. He pointed out the problems of these systems and additionally provided a peer-to-peer approach of a voting system based on the block-
chain. At the DIID his research focuses dialog-based online argumentation.

Since 2001, Prof. Dr. Katrin Möltgen-Sicking teaches Political Sciences, Sociology and Intercultural Competences at the University of Applied Sciences for Public Administration and Management of North Rhine Westfalia in Cologne. Furthermore she is a lecturer for Project Management at the University of Kassel.

Among others, she has done some research about non institutionalized forms of political participation on the local area in Germany and Brazil and about political participation of migrants. In 2012, she spent a three-month research visit at the Federal University of Porto Alegre (Brazil) to study the forms of local political part-
icipation in Brazil.

Prof. Dr. Martin Morlok holds the Chair for Public Law, Legal Theory and Sociology of Law at the Heinrich Heine University Dusseldorf since 2002. From 1997 to 2011 he was director of The Institute of German and International Party Law and Party Research (PRuF).

His research interests are constitutional law, parliamentary law, party law, religious law, state liability law and methodology

Nicole Najemnik is a research assistant at the University of Applied Sciences for Public Administration and Management of North Rhine-Westphalia. She studied International Development with a focus on political science in Vienna, Ankara and Mexico City and finished her Master’s degree with high honors. Since 2016 she is a lecturer at the University of Cologne as well as the Cologne University of Applied Sciences.

Her core research interests are digital inequalities, cyber violence as well as digitalization and inclusion. In her PhD thesis she analyzes possible factors of success as well as barriers for women’s political online-participation using the example of the participatory budget in Wuppertal

Daniel Neugebauer is a Ph.D. student at the computer science institute of Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, where he also obtained his Master’s degree (M.Sc.) in com-
puter science. In his Master’s thesis he analyzed methods for the fair allocation of heterogeneous, divisible resources among competing agents, focussing on incomplete allocations.

His research interests are in the areas of game theory and computational social choice, with a focus on formal argumentation. In his Ph.D. project he investigates formal argumentation models that are suitable to both describe and conduct online discussions.

Prof. Dr. Ulrich Rosar has held one of three chairs of sociology within the Department of Social Sciences since 2010. Since 2015, he has been Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at Heinrich Heine University Duesseldorf.

In teaching and research he mainly focuses on questions of political sociology, the sociological analysis of inequality, and the methodology of empirical social sciences.

Prof. Dr. Jörg Rothe is head of the working group for complexity theory and cryptology at Heinrich Heine University Duesseldorf since 2000. Since 2014 he is chair of the Department of Computer Science.

His research interests are in computational social choice, algorithmic game theory, and fair division, typically focusing on the algorithmic and complexity-theoretic properties of the related problems. At DIID, he is interested in formal models of theoretical computer science for the description and evaluation of user interactions in online participation processes.

Bastian Rottinghaus is research assistant at the DIID since 2016. He studied social sciences (B.A. and M.A.) in Duesseldorf. From 2010 he was a research assistant at the Department of Sociology II of the Heinrich Heine University and was primarily involved in the realization of several survey studies.

In his dissertation submitted and defended in 2015, he dealt with the empirical measurement of aspects of political competence and their effects on political participatory action. At the DIID he is part of a research project focusing on effects and influencing factors of local online participation in a comparative perspective.

Hilmar Schadrack is a Ph.D. student at the computer science institute of Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf, where he also obtained his Master’s degree (M.Sc.) in computer science and Bachelor’s degree (B.Sc.) in mathematics. In his theses he was researching in the field of game theory and discussed the question on how dynamic voting, with changing sets of voters and candidates, can be modelled.

His research interests are in the areas of game theory, computational social choice, and abstract argumentation. In his Ph.D. project he models and investigates the behaviour of agents through the steps of an argumentation process.

Alexander Schneider is research assistant at the chair for computer networks at the Heinrich Heine University Duesseldorf. He studied computer science (M.Sc.) in Duesseldorf as well.

He is interested in online voting systems with an emphasis on security, online-participation and computer networks.

Cornelia Schoenwald is a clerk at the DIID as well as at the chairs of sociology I and II. She also works for the internship office of the Heinrich-Heine University. She holds a degree as an industrial clerk.

At the DIID, she is responsible for the external funds management, personnel administration, event management, and material work.

Sabrina Schöttle is a research assistant and PhD-student at Heinrich Heine University Duesseldorf, Chair for Sociology II. She studied Political Science and German Literature at RWTH Aachen University (B.A) and Social Science (Socio-
logy and Political Science) at Heinrich-Heine University Duesseldorf (M.A.).

Her Research is on E-Participation, quantitative methods of social science and data analysis, gender (in)equality, sociology of prejudice and social inequality. Her PhD project is on political participation and motivation, evaluation and gender. The PhD project wants to give answers to the question of why so few people participate politically. Quantitative analysis with data of an own, representative study, will help to answer this with a focus on the influencing factors on e-participation.

Christopher Starke works as a post-doctoral researcher for political communication at the Department of Social Sciences (Prof. Frank Marcinkowski) at the University of Düsseldorf.

From 2012 to 2017 he was a PhD candidate at the chair ‘Communication – Media – Society’ of the Institute for Communication Science (University of Münster). In 2016, Christopher Starke completed a research and teaching visit at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. He obtained his PhD in Communication Research from the University of Münster. His dissertation titled ‘United in Diversity? The Effects of Media Identity Framing on Individual European Solidarity’ will be published in 2019. In addition to European solidarity, his research and teaching activities focus on political communication, artificial intelligence, political trust and corruption.

Malte Steinbach works at the Chair of Business Administration, in particular Organization Studies and Human Resource Management at the Heinrich Heinrich University in Duesseldorf. He studied Geography, Urban Planning and Economics at the University of Bonn.

In his master thesis he studied the use of online-participation in urban development projects in the city of Bonn. His research focuses on the organizers of online-participation processes using organization theories. In his dissertation, Malte Steinbach analyzes the diffusion of Online-Participation in public organizations based on neo-institutionalist approaches.

Since July 2018, Anke Stoll is a research associate in the junior research group “Deliberative Discussions in the Social Web” at the Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf. She studied Communication and Media Research at the University of Münster, the University of Zürich and the University of Leipzig.

In her master thesis Anke Stoll worked on the computer-aided classification of text data using machine-learning methods. Her research interests are quantitative methods of social science and applied statistics. She is particularly interested in the automated capture and analysis of text content. As a member of the DIID she deals with the computer-aided analysis of online deliberation processes and discussions.

Prof. Dr. Süß holds the Chair of Business Administration, in particular Organization Studies and Human Resource Management at the Heinrich Heine University Duesseldorf since April 2010. From October 2013 till December 2014, he was Dean of the Faculty of Business Administration and Economics at the Heinrich-Heine-University Duesseldorf. From January 2015 till September 2017, he was Vice President for Quality in Studies and Human Resource Management. Moreover, he is speaker of the Manchot Graduate School “Competitiveness of Young Enterprises“ (WEJU).

His research interests focus on Organizational Theory, Human Resource Management, new employment forms, empirical human resource and organizational research as well as higher education management. In context of the DIID, he is interested in democratic voting process‘ changes through online-participation in enterprises and other organizations.

Stefan Thierse has been affiliated with the Institute for Social Sciences at the Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf since October 2016. He held an interim junior professorship for Political Science and European Integration until September 2017. He was promoted to temporary academic senior councilor (Akademischer Oberrat auf Zeit) in October 2017. Before coming to Düsseldorf, he has held positions as Research Assistant at the University of Duisburg-Essen (NRW School of Governance) and at the University of Bonn, where he received his PhD in 2015 with a work on minority rights in the European Parliament.

In his post-doctoral studies, his research interests are on the role of non-governmental organizations in the policy process, with a particular focus on constitutional complaints. As a member of the DIID, he is specifically interested in the significance of internet-based organization of political participation in the context of litigation and petitions.

Jun.-Prof. Dr. Ulf Tranow is assistant professor of Sociology at the Heinrich Heine University Duesseldorf since 2013.

His research interests include sociological theories of action, social mechanisms of normative integration as well as problems of collective good and their solutions. At DIID, he is interested in the social, societal and institutional conditions for building political confidence in conflicting online deliberation processes.

Since 2004 Prof. Dr. Gerhard Vowe is professor of Com-
munication and Media Studies at the Heinrich Heine University Duesseldorf. He is spokesperson of the DFG (German Research Fund) research group “Political Com-
munication in the Online World”.

His study interest comprise political online communication, media politics and security issues in mass media. As part of the DIID, he is interested in deviant forms of political online communication.

Marco Wähner works as a student assistant (WHB) especially on the project YOUniversity. At the DIID he is also responsible for event management and administrative support.

Thomas Weiler studied law, political science, contemporary history and scandinavian studies at the University of the Saarland, Saarbrücken; Lund, Sweden; and the University of Bonn, Germany.

After his 1st state examn with a focus on European Law he worked as associate professor in Bonn and Greifswald. In 1999-200 he was a “visiting fellow” at the Dept. of Government at Harvard University. He then did his legal clerkship (Referendariat), e.g. at the Consulate General in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.A. and after the 2nd examn was ad-
mitted to the bar in 2002. He started teaching also at the University of Applied Sciences for Public Administration in NRW with a focus on Constitutional and European Law.

Prof. Dr. Barbara E. Weißenberger holds the Chair of Accounting in the Department of Business Administration and Economics at Heinrich Heine University Duesseldorf. She is also Affiliate Professor of Accounting at Bucerius Law School, Hamburg.

In her research, she is most interested in how management control system design affects managerial decision-making with respect to firms’ financial objectives as well as non-financial goals, e.g., compliance or ecological and social sustainability. At the DIID, she studies the impact of the digital transformation in firm’s business models as well as within the finance function on these issues.

Nadja Wilker holds a Bachelor of Communication and Political Sciences from the University of Muenster and a Master of Political Communication from the University of Duesseldorf.

In her master thesis she analysed the participative and representative dimensions of ‚Liquid Democracy‘, an online-based concept for democratic decision making made famous by the Pirate Party. At the end of 2012, she started working as a research assistant at the department of political sciences in Duesseldorf. Since 2014 she has been working on her PhD project as part of the NRW Graduate School Online Participation. Her research and teaching focus is in political (online) communication and theories of political participation and representation. In her research, she deals with questions of acceptance and legitimacy of public participation from the perspective of legislatures and political parties.

Theresa Witt is a research assistant at the law faculty at  the Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf. She studied law in Düsseldorf and passed the first state examination in May, 2015. Her major field of study was international and European law. During her studies, she worked as a student assistant at the Chair of Public Law, Legal Theory & Legal Sociology (faculty of law, HHU) for two years. In this period, especially being involved in the process of writing, editing, updating and commenting on juridical texts deepened her affinity to constitutional and state law.

In her doctoral thesis, she addresses top-down initiated, legally non-binding online-participation processes. Her main research question is whether – and if so, in which extent – such processes need to meet legal standards or should be regulated, although they do not produce legally binding results.

Since February 2018, Marc Ziegele is an assistant professor of Communication and Media Studies with a focus on political online communication at the Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf. He is also head of the junior research group “Deliberative Discussions in the Social Web” funded by the Ministry of Culture and Science of North Rhine-Westphalia. Before coming to Düsseldorf, he worked as a research associate at the Department of Communication at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, where he also graduated in Media Economy.

His research interests include participation and discussions of citizens on the internet. The DIID-based junior research group investigates how the quality and effects of public user discussions about political topics can be improved. Moreover, Ziegele analyzes the sources and consequences of people’s trust in the mass media and different aspects of citizens’ use of the social web at the interface of Communication Studies and Psychology.