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Based on the German Longitudinal Election Study (2016), we explain citizens' support for measures to increase women’s descriptive representation in parliament. Despite women's underrepresentation, we find little support for positive action measures, and in particular for legal gender quotas. Binary logit analyses show that support for the introduction of positive action measures is not affected by citizens' perceptions about the share of female members of parliament. However, experimental data reveal that receiving information about women's actual proportion in parliament has an impact on citizens' support for gender quotas, in particular among those who overestimate women's representation. Once they learn that the actual share is lower than they thought, they are more likely to support the introduction of quotas. This indicates that support for positive action measures can be changed through providing the correct information.

While populism and technocracy have attracted enormous scientific attention in recent years, surprisingly how the two concepts relate to each other has rarely been investigated. Looking at the case of the EU, we investigate how populist parties position themselves in relation to technocracy in general and the technocratic nature of EU institutions in particular. In a first theoretical step, we identify the core elements, modes of governance, and policy output of technocratic governance and use them to derive potential responses of populist parties. In the empirical part, we investigate these aspects of technocracy by applying quantitative and qualitative approaches using the 2019 European election manifestos of 12 populist parties. We show that left- and right-wing populist parties articulate anti-technocratic positions, particularly regarding the core elements of technocratic governance. The concrete technocratic critique differs regarding the respective host ideology. However, within the group of hybrid populist parties, ANO 2011 and GERB appear not to have a critical stance towards technocracy and thus can be classified as technocratic populist parties.

This thesis aims to show how a liberal-oriented party managed to develop social networks (using the example of Instagram) into an instrument of successful political communication and which frames were used for this. The investigation is carried out using the example of the German Free Democratic Party and Alliance 90/The Greens during the last three weeks before the 2021 federal election.

This thesis will examine how the media have framed the role of the current first ladies of France (Brigitte Macron) and Ukraine (Olena Zelenska) during the first three years of their husbands’ first term in office, i.e. 2017 to 2020 and 2019 to 2022 respectively.

Ausgehend von den vielfältigen Debatten um Quoten und weitere Gleichstellungsmaßnahmen zur Erhöhung des Anteils unterrepräsentierter Gruppen in den Parlamenten untersucht der Beitrag die Einstellungen der Bürger*innen in Deutschland zu diesen Maßnahmen für Frauen und Personen mit Migrationshintergrund. Insgesamt befürwortet nur eine Minderheit Quoten, wobei insbesondere gesetzliche Quoten und Maßnahmen für Personen mit Migrationshintergrund nur eine sehr geringe Unterstützung erfahren. Frauen und Anhänger*innen linker Parteien unterstützen signifikant häufiger positive Maßnahmen. Die Verbesserung der deskriptiven Repräsentation im Parlament wird von den Befragten als wichtigster Grund für die Unterstützung von Maßnahmen genannt.