Interactive cities? Local political online communication in Switzerland

Getting closer: The effects of personalized and interactive online political communication

Political parties and politicians increasingly use the possibilities of the Internet to communicate interactively with citizens and vice versa. The Internet also offers opportunities for individual politicians to profile themselves. These developments are often said to bring politics closer to citizens, increasing their political engagement in politics. Empirical evidence for such claims is, ho...

Analyzing online political discussion using three models of democratic communication

Research examining online political forums has until now been overwhelmingly guided by two broad perspectives: (1) a deliberative conception of democratic communication and (2) a diverse collection of incommensurable multi-sphere approaches. While these literatures have contributed many insightful observations, their disadvantages have left many interesting communicative dynamics largely unexpl...

The value of using local political online forums to reverse political disengagement

How Have Political Incentives for Local Officials Reduced Environmental Pollution in Resource-Depleted Cities?

Chinese resource-exhausted cities face more severe environmental pollution problems than other cities. In addressing these problems, the way local officials (usually senior party and government leaders) operate is very important, as their focus on political achievements may complicate how they manage environmental pollution in these cities. On the one hand, the traditional Gross Domestic Produc...

Communication-Efficient Non-interactive Proofs of Knowledge with Online Extractors

We show how to turn three-move proofs of knowledge into non-interactive ones in the random oracle model. Unlike the classical Fiat-Shamir transformation our solution supports an online extractor which outputs the witness from such a non-interactive proof instantaneously, without having to rewind or fork. Additionally, the communication complexity of our solution is significantly lower than for ...