FOR 1381: Political Communication in the Online World

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The diffusion of online media - from online newspapers and search engines to blogs and video portals - has changed communication in every area of life to a degree and at a rate hitherto unknown. This is also believed to apply to politics, especially with respect to election campaigns and public participation. There is plenty of speculation around the keyword "Web 2.0", ranging from one extreme to the other: at the one end an expectation of salvation, at the other end an expectation of doom. It is against this backdrop that the Research Unit intends to answer the question in how far political communication can be proved to change due to online media and what impact this, in turn, has on politics. The framework for answering this question is a model. The centre of the model is the change in political communication - structural changes in the communication relations between the actor groups (public, political organisations and media organisations) with respect to social, temporal and spatial aspects as well as with regards to content. One prerequisite is the media change - the extension of the media repertoire in society as a result of the use of the potentials of the Internet in public, semi-public and non-public communication. The alteration in political communication has a relevant impact on politics from individual, organisational and social perspectives and thus contributes to political change. By the Research Unit, three objectives have been set: (1) The investigation of the development of political communication should take the form of empirical, longitudinal studies, which result in a multi-faceted overall picture. This means that various analytical perspectives - those of individuals, of organisations and of society as a whole - and different methods - in particular surveys, content analysis and organisation analysis - need to be interlinked. In doing so, a number of theoretical approaches in the field of online communication will be tested and combined into one middle range theory made up of many modules. (2) The Research Unit is one of the places where junior researchers are qualified for the international research field of political communication - in the form of doctorates and state doctorates. (3) By means of a thematically focussed network of researchers, an innovative form of organisation will be tested for disciplines that are divided into smaller sections such as communication studies. The Research Unit includes seven sub-projects. Each will turn the overall question into a more specific problem by analysing the relations between the change in political communication, media change and political change from a specialised analytic perspective.