German politicians have identified a need for greater citizen involvement in decision-making than in the past, as confirmed by a recent German parliamentarians study ("DEUPAS"). As in other forms of social interactions, the Internet provides significant potential to serve as the digital interface between citizens and decision-makers: in the recent past, dedicated electronic participation ("e-participation") platforms (e.g. dedicated websites) have been provided by politicians and governments in an attempt to gather citizens" feedback and comment on a particular issue or subject. Some of these have been successful, but a large proportion of them are grossly under-used " often only small numbers of citizens use them. Over the same time period, enthusiasm of Society for social networks has increased and is now commonplace. Many citizens use social networks such as Facebook and Twitter for all kinds of purposes, and in some cases to discuss political issues. Social networks are therefore obviously attractive to politicians " from local government to federal agencies, politicians have integrated social media into their daily work. However, there is a significant challenge regarding the usefulness of social networks. The problem is the continuous increase in digital information: social networks contain vast amounts of information, and it is impossible for a human to manually filter the relevant information from the irrelevant (so-called "information overload"). Even using the search tools provided by social networks, it is still a huge task for a human to determine meanings and themes from the multitude of search results. New technologies and concepts have been proposed to provide summaries of masses of information through lexical analysis of social media messages, and therefore they promise an easy and quick overview of the information. This thesis examines the relevance of these analyses" results, for the use in everyday political life, with the emphasis on the social networks Facebook and Twitter as data sources. Here we make use of the WeGov Toolbox and its analysis components that were developed during the EU project WeGov. The assessment has been performed in consultation with actual policy-makers from different levels of German government: policy-makers from the German Federal Parliament, the State Parliament North Rhine-Westphalia, the State Chancellery of the Saarland and the cities of Cologne and Kempten all took part in the study. Our method was to execute the analyses on data collected from Facebook and Twitter, and present the results to the policy-makers, who would then evaluate them using a mixture of qualitative methods. The responses of the participants have provided us with some useful conclusions: 1) None of the participants believe that e-participation is possible in this way. But participants confirm that "citizen-friendliness" can be supported by this approach. 2) The most likely users for the summarisation tools are those who have experience with social networks, but are not "power users". The reason being is that "power users" already knew the relevant information provided by analysis tools. But without any experiences for social networks it is hard to interpret the analysis results the right way. 3) The evaluation has considered geographical aspects, and related this to e.g. a politician- constituency as a local area of social networks. Comparing the rural to the urban areas, it is shown that the amount of relevant political information in the rural areas is low. While the proportion of publicly available information in urban areas is relatively high, the proportion in the rural areas is much lower. The findings that result from the engagement with policy-makers will be systematically surveyed and validated within this thesis.