The project includes the analysis of existing quality labels and certifications for NGOs and the elaboration of recommendations for the attention of SDC, which of them are suitable to serve as a basis for subsidy decisions for program funding in the years 2025 to 2028.
In a typical election, citizens encounter a bewildering menu of parties vying for their vote. How do citizens cope with this abundance of choice and how does the coping mechanism affect the functioning of electoral democracy? These are the central questions of this book project. Building on consideration set models of choice, the book first presents a new micro-level theory of electoral democracy. It validates this with experimental and survey data. Next, it looks at the implication of the theory for party behavior and competition. Finally, it looks at system-level factors that affect choice behavior and answers the normative question of whether abundant choice can be too much of a good thing.
According to the church law (Kirchengesetz; KiG) the canton of Zurich contributes since 2010 to the costs of the cantonal church corporate bodies for their activities in the fields of education, social issues and culture for society as a whole (§ 19 Abs. 2 KiG). For the time periods 2014-2019 and 2020-2025 the financial support for the evangelical-reformed state church of the canton of Zurich and the roman-catholic corporate body of the canton of Zurich are based on activity programs with global budgets. This study aims at providing the systematic scientific basis in regard of the next funding period (2026-2031). The study includes three surveys: A survey of the political municipalities in the canton of Zurich, a survey of the population of the Canton of Zurich and a survey of the agencies of the two big Landeskirchen of Zurich.
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The "Stop Hate Speech" project combines natural language processing and machine learning with civil society engagement to counter online hate speech. The project is led by alliance F (Federation of Swiss Women’s Associations) and their partners and implemented in close collaboration with the Digital Democracy Lab (UZH) and the Public Policy Group and Immigration Policy Lab (ETH). Since 2020, the Stop Hate Speech project is generously supported by InnoSuisse and since 2021 also by a grant from BAKOM, the Swiss Federal Office of Communications. The project seeks to algorithmically detect hate speech across a variety of online venues (newspaper and social media) and to generate actionable knowledge about effective strategies for counter speech. For this purpose, the project team will develop a deep learning pipeline for automatic hate speech detection and evaluate a range of promising counter speech strategies with experimental methods. The close cooperation with alliance F and Swiss media outlets ensures that the scientific findings directly translate into effective detection and reduction of online hate speech. The goal is to improve the quality of public discourse and to minimize offline consequences of hostile online behavior.
The European Consensus method is a tool for judicial decision-making employed by the European Court of Human Rights when adjudicating on sensitive moral and social issues. Our project has employed human hand-coding combined with computational techniques to uncover the nature of European Consensus in judgments rendered by the Court. We find that European Consensus is a tool that has become increasingly common over time, is used more when the Court makes decisions in cases involving certain member states – most notably the United Kingdom, but also France – and when making decisions with respect to certain articles of the European Convention of Human Rights – most notably articles 8 (private and family life), 2 (life) 10 (freedom of expression) and 14 (non-discrimination). These findings help shape our understanding of how human rights law has evolved in Europe through the ECHR system.
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The evaluation deals with the food legislation that was fundamentally revised in 2017 and is intended to protect consumers from health risks and deception. It is formative in nature and aims to identify any need for improvement in the implementation and revision of food legislation. The evaluation formulates ten recommendations on the basis of various analyses including diverse perspectives and the use of different methods.
Am 15. März 2020 fanden in Bayern die Kommunalwahlen statt – mitten in den Anfangswochen der Corona-Pandemie in Deutschland. In etwa einem Fünftel der bayerischen Landkreise gab es zu diesem Zeitpunkt aber noch keinen bestätigten Corona-Fall. Wir vergleichen das Wahlverhalten in diesen Landkreisen mit bayerischen Landkreisen, in denen bereits Corona nachgewiesen wurde. Unsere Ergebnisse deuten nicht darauf hin, dass lokale Corona-Fälle die Wahlbeteiligung negativ beeinflusst haben. Die Wähler haben sich nicht abschrecken lassen.
I work on the transformation of Social Democracy in several complementary contexts: In my own research, I study the transformation of the electoral potential of social democratic parties and how this transformation affects welfare politics. Jointly with Tarik Abou-Chadi (UZH), Markus Wagner (Uni Vienna), Reto Mitteregger (UZH) and Nadja Mosimann (UZH), I study the determinants of electoral preferences for different programmatic profiles of Social Democratic parties via different types of observational and experimental survey designs. Jointly with Herbert Kitschelt, I co-direct the project “Beyond Social Democracy: Transformation of the Left in Emerging Knowledge Societies”, whose output is a book (edited volume) on the topic and a wide range of exchanges with different European Social Democratic Parties and organizations close to them. Jointly with Tarik Abou-Chadi, Reto Bürgisser, Matthias Enggist, Reto Mitteregger, Nadja Mosimann and Delia Zollinger, I am writing a book (in Geman, geared to a broader audience) on the electorate and strategic perspectives of the Swiss Social Democratic Party („Wählerschaft und Perspektiven der Sozialdemokratie in der Schweiz“, forthcoming with NZZ Libro Verlag in 2022).