Deliberative Democracy and Digital Communication. The Effects of Social Media Platforms for Deliberative Systems

Social media platforms continue to be a central place for discussing political issues. Unlike in non-digital spaces, however, there are specific digital architectures and organizational processes that structure these discussions and thus also influence their contents. The project gets to the bottom of these structuring factors. From the theoretical perspective of the “deliberative systems approach”, it sheds light on the influence of these factors on democratic systems at the micro, meso and macro level. To this end, it draws on empirical findings from studies with very different subject areas and gains insights into the development of democratic quality under these influences. By bringing together theoretical and empirical findings from different types of digitalization research and systematically examining them from the perspective of the deliberative systems approach, the project contributes to research into the influence of digital communication on democratic communication processes.