The emergence of the Internet fueled euphoric—partially utopian—visions that can be summarized as democratic promises. In most cases, the normative and empirical discussion so far has considered e‑democracy tools and their potential, regardless of the scale of interaction—be it local, national, or transnational—as a one-size-fits-all approach, assuming that what is applicable for the national level will be equally true for the subnational and transnational levels. We argue that the question of whether the Internet and digital tools can fulfill the democratic promises must be confronted in a more differentiated way, examining under which spatial conditions e‑democracy is more likely to incentivize citizens to engage and to involve more citizens as well as marginalized citizens in public debates and decision making. The article introduces scale as a new element for a better theoretical understanding of e‑democracy. We establish a conceptual framework that enables us to capture scale as distance in terms of territorial, cognitive, and affective distance. The spatial perspective brings an innovative spin to the somewhat petrified positions on the mobilizing or reinforcing effects of digital tools as well as a new theoretical argument for the debate on e‑democracy in general.

Several scholars have attributed high hopes to social media regarding their alleged ability to enable a nonhierarchical and freely accessible debate among the citizenship (Loader & Mercea, 2011; Shirky, 2011). Those hopes have culminated in theses such those describing the social web as being a ‘new public sphere’ (Castells, 2009, p. 125) as well as in expectations regarding its revitalizing potential for the ‘Habermas’s public sphere’ (Kruse, Norris, & Flinchum, 2018, p. 62). Yet, these assumptions are not uncontested, particularly in the light of socially mediated populism (Mazzoleni & Bracciale, 2018). Interestingly, research on populism in the social web is still an exception. The same is true for the populist permeation of the social media discourse on migration, as a highly topical issue. This study seeks to elaborate on this research gap by examining to what extent the Twitter debate on the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly, and Regular Migration (GCM) was permeated by populist content. For this purpose, almost 70,000 tweets on the most important Hashtags referring to the GCM that took place in Marrakesh in December 2018 were collected and the 500 widest-reaching tweets analysed in terms of their populist permeation. Against initial expectations, the empirical findings show that populist narratives did not dominate the Twitter debate on migration. However, the empirical results indicate that ordinary citizens play an important role in the creation and dissemination of populist content. It seems that the social web widens the public sphere, including those actors who do not communicate in accordance with the Habermasian conceptualization of it.

While the political communication and participation activities of young adults are changing, this is often not adequately captured by research due to a too narrow conceptualization of the phenomenon. Our approach conceptualizes political communication as activities comprising the reception of political content, interpersonal communication regarding political issues and political participation. We incorporated both analog and digital media, as well as different forms of political participation, to reflect the complex reality of political communication activities of young adults in the digital age. On the basis of a sample from 2013, we investigated the patterns of political communication of young adults (ages 18–33 years). This age group represents the first generation to have grown up under the ubiquitous influence of the internet and other modern information technologies. In addition, we examined factors influencing the formation of different political communication patterns of this generation. Results of cluster analyses demonstrated that young adults should not be seen as a homogeneous group. Rather, we found six communication types. Interestingly, no online-only type of political communication was revealed, By applying multinomial logistic regression analysis, we were able to demonstrate that socio-demographic variables, individual resources and cognitive involvement in politics influence the likelihood of belonging to more active political communication types. The present study investigated various information and communication opportunities of young adults, and is rare in terms of the richness of data provided. Our conceptual innovative approach enables a better understanding of young adults’ complex political communication patterns. Moreover, our approach encourages follow-up research, as our results provide a valuable starting point for intergenerational comparisons regarding changes in political engagement among young adults in Germany, as well as for cross-country analysis regarding different generations of young adults.

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The local level is highly important for political engagement, as political issues that are relevant to citizens' daily lives are discussed at this level. Therefore, political parties are especially interested in organizing a strong local basis. Yet, empirical research on the local party units is rather scarce, particularly with respect to their social media activities. We do not know whether the local units of political parties are nowadays active players in the most important communication sphere, and nor do we know anything about potential driving forces of their activities on social media. Using big data, we are able to demonstrate that local party units in Germany are especially active on Facebook during a heated election campaign. Interestingly, we also confirm this observation with regard to user activities. Furthermore, our results reveal that the local basis of the German right‐wing populist party Alternative for Germany has an insurmountable lead on Facebook—in terms of both published posts and user response. This finding supports the thesis that a right‐wing ecosystem on Facebook has been established in Germany. Besides election and party effects, we find that urbanized areas provide better opportunities for the social media usage of political parties and citizens.