"Voto por voto, casilla por casilla?" : Democratic consolidation, political intermediation, and the Mexican election of 2006

After he had only tightly lost the election in July 2006, Andrés Manuel López Obrador and his Coalición claimed fraud and asserted that unfair conditions during the campaign had diminished his chances to win the presidency. The paper investigates this latter allegation centering on a perceived campaign of hate, unequal access to campaign resources and malicious treatment by the mass media. It further analyzes the mass media’s performance during the conflictual post electoral period until the final decision of the Federal Electoral Tribunal on September 5th, 2006. While the media’s performance during the campaign tells us about their compliance with fair media coverage mechanisms that have been implemented by electoral reforms in the 1990s, the mass media is uncontained by such measures after the election. Thus, their mode of coverage of the postelectoral conflicts allows us to “test” the mass media’s transformation to a more unbiased, social responsible “fourth estate”. Finally the paper scrutinizes whether the claims of fraud and the protests by the leftist movement resulted in lower levels of institutional trust and democratic support. The analysis of the media performance is based on data provided by the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE). Its Media Monitor encompassed more than 150 TV stations, 240 radio stations and 200 press publications. However, there is no comparable data available for the postelectoral period. Interviews with Mexican media experts, which the author has conducted during the postelectoral period, serve as empirical basis for the second part. Data on the public opinions and attitudes of Mexican citizens are taken from the 2007 Latinobarometro, the 2006 Encuesta Nacional and several polls conducted by Grupo Reforma. The results do not support López Obradors notions. Even though a strong party bias is characteristic of the Mexican media system, all findings hint at a continuity of balanced campaign coverage and fair access to mass media publicity. Coverage during the postelectoral period was more polarized, yet both sides remained at least partially open for oppositional views. The claims of fraud, mass protest mobilization and anti-institutional discourse by Lopez Obrador’s leftist movement seem not to have caused significant loss in institutional trust, support of and satisfaction with democracy, even though these levels remain quite low

Media pluralism between market mechanisms and control: the German divide

This article starts from the assumption that patterns of media concentration and measures of regulating media pluralism are not the results of random media policy adjustments, but are rooted in trajectories of public sphere conceptions and shaped by a set of varying actor interests. In Germany, regulation of media plurality differs greatly between the print media and the broadcast sector. The print media market is shaped by commercial ownership and largely deregulated, except for special measures of fusion control. The broadcast sector is shaped by a dual system of public and commercial broadcasters that are regulated by non-governmental public institutions. This article focuses on two current developments regarding the regulation of pluralism in German media: The post-communist legacy of a concentrated print media market in former East Germany and the paradigmatic change in defining pluralism in the broadcast sector

Media Governance im interregionalen Vergleich - Informelle Regulierung in Italien und Mexiko

Zusammenfassung: Das Gebot der Pressefreiheit begrenzt in modernen Massendemokratien die Interventionsmöglichkeiten staatlicher Akteure im Medienbereich. Dadurch werden vermeintlich "softe" Instrumente von Selbstregulierung und informeller Regulierung zu naheliegenden Alternativen. Doch warum gelingt es informellen Praktiken und Institutionen nicht, Medienpluralismus effektiv zu befördern? Italien und Mexiko weisen die höchste Medienkonzentration in der OECD auf, beide gelten als defekte Demokratien und informelle Regelsetzung hat in beiden Ländern Tradition. Der Beitrag kommt zum Ergebnis, dass Informalität nicht zu einer effektiven Regulierung von Medienpluralismus führt, weil sie sowohl die Schaffung transparenter Regeln für neue Akteure auf dem Medienmarkt verhindert und Pluralismusförderung am mangelnden Problembewusstsein und geringer Professionalisierung im Mediensektor scheitert

What constitutes a local public Ssphere?: Building a monitoring framework for comparative analysis

Despite the research tradition in analyzing public communication, local public spheres have been rather neglected by communication science, although they are crucial for social cohesion and democracy. Existing empirical studies about local public spheres are mostly case studies which implicitly assume that cities are alike. Based on a participatory-liberal understanding of democracy, we develop a theoretical framework, from which we derive a monitor covering structural, social, and spatial aspects of local communication to empirically compare local public spheres along four dimensions: (1) information, (2) participation, (3) inclusion, and (4) diversity. In a pilot study, we then apply our monitor to four German cities that are comparable in size and regional function (‘regiopolises’). The monitoring framework is built on local statistical data, some of which was provided by the cities, while some came from our own research. We show that the social structures and the normative assessment of the quality of local public spheres can vary among similar cities and between the four dimensions. We hope the innovative monitor prototype enables scholars and local actors to compare local public spheres across spaces, places, and time, and to investigate the impact of social change and digitalization on local public spheres

Hierarchical and dynamic threshold Paillier cryptosystem without trusted dealer

We propose the first hierarchical and dynamic threshold Paillier cryptosystem without trusted dealer and prove its security in the malicious adversary model. The new cryptosystem is fully distributed, i. e., public and private key generation is performed without a trusted dealer. The private key is shared with a hierarchical and dynamic secret sharing scheme over the integers. In such a scheme not only the amount of shareholders, but also their levels in the hierarchy decide whether or not they can reconstruct the secret and new shareholders can be added or removed without reconstruction of the secret

What the Scientific Community Needs from Data Access under Art. 40 DSA: 20 Points on Infrastructures, Participation, Transparency, and Funding

Article 40 of the Digital Services Act (DSA) creates for the first time a clear regulation that grants science independence from individual platforms and improved data quality, thus ensuring that socially relevant aspects of digitization can be investigated appropriately, consistently, and independently. It makes it possible to respond more quickly and accurately to new issues and developments in an evidence-based manner, thus contributing to a fair, digital public sphere that considers societal risks and opportunities. This policy paper aims to inform the expected Delegated Act of the EU Commission as well as the legislative process for the German Digital Services Act (Digitale Dienste Ge-setz) and to formulate necessities from the perspective of platform researchers. This perspective is of utmost importance, as research on systemic risks depends on the expertise of scientific actors

Was die Wissenschaft im Rahmen des Datenzugangs nach Art. 40 DSA braucht: 20 Punkte zu Infrastrukturen, Beteiligung, Transparenz und Finanzierung

Artikel 40 des Digital Services Act (DSA) schafft erstmals eine klare Regelung, die der Wissenschaft Unabhängigkeit von den einzelnen Plattformen und eine verbesserte Datenqualität gewährt und so sicherstellt, dass gesellschaftlich relevante Aspekte der Digitalisierung angemessen, konsistent und unabhängig untersucht werden können. Er ermöglicht, schneller und passgenau auf neue Fragestellungen und Entwicklungen evidenzbasiert zu reagieren und so zu einer fairen, digitalen Öffentlichkeit beizutragen, die sowohl gesellschaftliche Risiken als auch ihre Chancen in den Blick nimmt. Dieses Policy Paper zielt darauf, den erwarteten Delegated Act der EU-Kommission als auch das Gesetzgebungsverfahren zum deutschen Digitale-Dienste-Gesetz zu informieren und Notwendigkeiten aus Sicht von Plattformforschenden zu formulieren. Diese Sichtweise ist von größter Bedeutung, da von der Expertise wissenschaftlicher Akteure die Erforschung der systemischen Risiken abhängt

Towards Secure Evaluation of Online Functionalities (Corrected and Extended Version)

To date, ideal functionalities securely realized with secure multi-party computation (SMPC) mainly considers functions of the private inputs of a fixed number of a priori known parties. In this paper, we generalize these definitions such that protocols implementing online algorithms in a distributed fashion can be proven to be privacy-preserving. Online algorithms compute online functionalities that allow parties to arrive and leave over time, to provide multiple inputs and to obtain multiple outputs. In particular, the set of parties participating changes over time, i.e., at different points in time different sets of parties evaluate a function over their private inputs. To this end, we propose the notion of an online trusted third party that allows to prove the security of SMPC protocols implementing online functionalities or online algorithms, respectively. We show that any online functionality can be implemented perfectly secure in the presence of a semi-honest adversary, if strictly less than 1/2 of the parties participating are corrupted. We show that the same result holds in the presence of a malicious adversary if it corrupts strictly less than 1/3 of the parties and always allows the corrupted parties to arrive and provide input. Note, this is the corrected and extended version of the work presented in [24]