DIID Monitor Online Participation NRW

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. Malte Steinbach supervised DIID as scientific coordinator from April 2019 to April 2020. Since 2020, he has been project manager at the DIID cooperation partner Zebralog in Bonn. He wrote his dissertation at the Chair of Business Administration, esp. Labor, Human Resources and Organization at the HHU-Düsseldorf as part of the NRW Progress College Online Participation. At the University of Bonn, he studied geography with a minor in urban planning and economics. In his master thesis he investigated the topic of e-participation in urban development using the city of Bonn as an example. His research deals with the providers of online participation processes from an organizational theory perspective.

In his doctoral thesis, he investigated the diffusion of online participation in public organizations based on neoinstitutionalist organizational theories.

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.

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.