Abstract:

Introduction:
Over the past few years, studies are showing an increasing interest in politics, appearing in higher voter participation and increasing involvement of the public in political discussions. The reason for this is, inter alia, an increasingly high rate of divisive political issues and topics. Furthermore, these topics get more and more complex and in consequence intransparent and unpredictable. Current examples are TTIP, the so-called Brexit or most of the recent and upcoming elections. This leads to the point that, even if facing a higher interest in politics, many people are forming their opinion without estimating and considering all relevant facts or resist from taking an active part in the discussion respectively political processes at all. As documented by Lange et al., one of the determining factors for a higher involvement in political processes is transparent information and political education.

Aim:
As evaluated by Marschall a contemporary approach to improve individual understanding and orientation in the political spectrum are web-based self-assessment tests. Thus, the aim of this study was to determine the role of political self-assessment tests as an impartial tool to orientate oneself as an interested citizen in the current political environment and to identify improvement measures.

Material and methods:
This is a qualitative case study conducted in 2016 on basis of a literature review and a comparison of existing solutions for self-assessment tests in Germany. Both were used to conduct qualitative data, evaluating the influence of online-content and web-based tests and identify implementation gaps and possible improvements measured by the aim to improve political education and information. To examine the thesis via empirical data, the findings from the comparison have been used to develop a new self-assessment test.

Results:
The findings of the study indicate that the importance of online contents and self-assessment tests for political education is increasing and furthermore a concept that has proven to be useful, especially in Germany. The findings of the qualitative analysis, however, have shown implementation gaps in the current solutions as it comes to their narrow focus on specific periods or a complicated presentation. Based on the analysis a self-assessment test has been developed and launched on www.politnavi.de. In the future, the web-based test can serve to collect empirical data for a continuous improvement process and further studies.

Keywords:

Innovation, technology, web application, self-assessment test, politics, political education and information.