Quality of online debate, content characteristics and forms of online discourse in political participatory processes.
- Which features of online discourse increase the quality of debate and decisions?
- What is the effect of interaction density, controversy, emotionality and reasoning in an online debate on the emergence of majorities?
- Under which conditions does online discourse promote consensus and which conditions lead to polarization?
- What role do story telling or personal experiences play in an online discourse?
Ansprechpartner
Prof. Dr. Christiane Eilders
Communication Studies
Prof. Dr. Christiane Eilders has been Professor of Communication and Media Studies at HHU-Düsseldorf since 2011. In October 2023 she became the new director at the Center for Advanced Internet Studies (CAIS) in Bochum. From 2019 until 2023 she served as the speaker of the DIID. She used to be a member of the DFG research group “Political Communication in the Online World”. In research and teaching, she is concerned with public discourse and public opinion formation and examines the role of established mass media and online communication in this process.
In the context of DIID, she is interested in the deliberative quality and trajectories of online discourses in the context of political participation processes.
Research Interests
Projects
Contact
Dr. Katharina Esau
Alumni, Communication Studies
Dr. Katharina Esau has been a PostDoc at Queensland University of Technology, at the Digital Media Research Centre since 2022. There, she is conducting research as part of the Australian Laureate project “Determining the Drivers and Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate”. She holds a PhD in Communication and Media Studies from HHu-Düsseldorf on the topic of “Forms of Communication and Dynamics of Deliberation”.
Her research focuses on political communication, digital public sphere, public opinion formation and democratic innovation.