Tobias Escher is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the Department of  Social Sciences and leads a junior research group funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, focused on the effects of citizen participation on quality and legitimacy of political decisions regarding the transformation towards sustainable mobility, in particular on the local level. Previously he has managed both the Düsseldorf Institute for Internet and Democracy (DIID) and the PhD programme on local level online participation (NRW Forschungskolleg) of Heinrich-Heine-University Duesseldorf. His research is interested in the legitimacy and effectiveness of democratic sytems with a focus on citizen participation, sustainability & mobility as well as policy analytics.

Tobias Escher has a background in the Social Sciences with a PhD in Information, Communication and the Social Sciences from the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford. Having previously worked and studied in Oxford, London, Leicester and Berlin, he joined Heinrich Heine University Duesseldorf in 2011.