The Discourse of the Political Participation of Germany Inhabitants of the Eastern and Western Regions in the Context of Digital Democracy (Based on the Electronic Petitions of the Change.org Platform)

The master's thesis is aimed at studying the digital political participation of the German citizens from the eastern and western regions. It is primarily based on the online petitions of non-governmental digital resources (Change.org). In the course of the study, 322 electronic appeals belonging to the federal eastern lands were analyzed, and 714 - to western lands in the period from 2012 till 2018. Semantic analysis in identifying problem groups was used as a research method. Moreover methotodology encompasses following issues: thematic mapping, cluster analysis, and sentiment analysis to identify the emotional component in the online petitions’ texts. In the framework of the study, there was represented the hypothesis that comprises the idea, that FRG residents’ of the eastern and western regions employ different sociolinguistic models for representing social and political priorities in the creation of electronic petitions on the digital resource Change.org, reflecting the historical differences in the worldview in the 20th century between the "Eastern" and "Western" "Germans, was partially confirmed.