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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).
The attitudes of the population towards (public) regulation are the focus of the present study. It is a follow-up study to the 2016 analysis of the attitudes of the Swiss population to public regulation (Höglinger/Widmer 2016) and is again based on a population survey. The comparison with 2016 shows that certain attitudes have changed over the last four years, while many attitudes have remained stable. The overall picture remains multi-faceted: Swiss voters are often not for or against regulation per se, but differentiate between the various regulatory objectives and contexts.
Child protection and foster care: The impact of institutions, funding, and implementation How do federalistic differences manifest themselves in child protection? To which degree do they influence child protection and foster care policies? Which measures will be funded at which regional level? Is there a correlation between funding, the authority to decide, and responsibility? This project wishes to ensure a systematic analysis of cantonal child protection policies, their inherent financial dependencies, and the impact on child protection practice in 26 cantons over the course of time. To the present state of knowledge, no in-depth investigation of the economic ties resulting from these cantonal policies has been carried out. This project will bridge this research gap by analyzing the different organizational framework conditions as well as the various financing mechanisms applied between 1970 and today. The systematic analysis of the political and financial structures in the cantons over the course of time and the combination of economic and the political analyses will contribute to improving child protection with the means available.
Joint project by myself, Simon Bornschier, Delia Zollinger, Lukas Haffert and Marco Steenbergen (all UZH) Read our article in the Comparative Political Studies. Electoral politics in advanced democracies have undergone major upheaval in recent decades. The last fifty years have seen the rise of culturally connoted identity politics and the relative decline of political conflict over economic state intervention. Party politics in many countries have changed beyond recognition. Strands of social cleavage theory constitute comprehensive attempts to make sense of these developments. They posit that socio-structural divisions are translated into politics through the mobilization of shared collective identities. However, many studies of social cleavages operate with outdated notions of socio-structural categories and mobilization patterns. Our project integrates theories and concepts of social identity theory, political psychology and social cleavage theory to study the formation of group identities, their mobilization and the formation of new cleavages structuring electoral politics in the 21st century through public opinion surveys in Germany, the UK, Switzerland and France.
DISINTEGRATION is a research project run by Stefanie Walter (University of Zurich) and funded by an ERC Consolidator Grant. It examines the mass politics of disintegration and pays particular attention how other voters, elites and governments in other countries respond to voter-endorsed challenges to international institutions. PUBLIC OPINION (WP 1): When and how does one country’s mass-based disintegration experience encourage or deter demands for disintegration in other countries? DOMESTIC DISCOURSE (WP 2): How are the contagion effects of mass-based disintegration transmitted through domestic elites and domestic discourse? DISINTEGRATION NEGOTIATIONS (WP 3): How do an international institution’s other member states respond to one member state’s mass-based disintegration bid? THEORIZING DISINTEGRATION (WP 4): Building a theory of mass-based disintegration. DISINTEGRATION is a research project funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program grant agreement No 817582 (ERC Consolidator Grant DISINTEGRATION, 2019-2024) and the University of Zurich.
In the case of heterogeneous and politically divided societies, the literature on democratic consolidation often recommends relying on rules and practices that disperse political power (e.g. Lijphart, 1991; Linder, 1994; Schneider, 2008). However, the relationship between democratic consolidation and power dispersion is complex, because actors critical of democratization may use democratic rules and processes to halt democratic consolidation. Other scholars have therefore recommended the concentration of power to create stable governments and exclude non-democratic groups from power.We examine the complex relationship between democratic consolidation, power dispersion, and the use of (non-)democratic rules and processes to further or stop this consolidation process in Switzerland from 1848 onward. After the short civil war of 1847 and subsequent creation of the federal state in 1848, Switzerland's young democracy was confronted with several societal groups skeptical of the federal state and democracy. We examine how the societal groups controlling political power in the early decades used non-democratic means to limit the power of societal groups critical of democratization. At the same time, we explore how these societal groups critical of democracy used instruments provided by the democratic political system in order to limit democratic consolidation or the development of state capacity. Ultimately, we ask whether and how (non-)democratic rules and processes were used to further or stop the democratic consolidation in Switzerland.We focus on three distinct aspects of democratic consolidation and power dispersion at cantonal and national level: suffrage restrictions to exclude certain societal groups, the adaptation of electoral district boundaries for political reasons (redistricting), and direct democratic rules and practices. While restrictions on suffrage and the use of redistricting to achieve partisan advantages (often called 'gerrymandering') are prominent examples of electoral malpractice (Schedler, 2002; Birch, 2011), the role of direct democracy is rather specific to Switzerland, but certainly no less relevant. For each aspect, we ask how these rules and practices were used to further or halt democratic consolidation, how the rules were adapted to improve democratic processes, and what kind of effects these democratization reforms had on political outcomes.Methodologically, we lay particular emphasis on the micro-foundations of historical processes. Following recent developments in democratization research (most notably Ziblatt, 2009), we look at subnational variation, both at cantonal and district level, as well as direct democratic procedures and roll-call votes in parliament. Typically based on archival research, these new methodological approaches to democratization research combine the comparative strengths of historical research regarding primary sources and context-sensitivity with the powerful methodological tool-kit of the social sciences. It is not least with regard to these methodological approaches that Switzerland offers excellent conditions for research on democratic consolidation, as historical documents are often available, direct democratic procedures and cantonal variation allow for subnational analysis, and roll-call votes in parliament were quite common.The findings of our research will contribute to a better understanding of how young democracies consolidate and institutional choices are shaped by political and social conflicts. In addition, we examine the strategies used by young democracies to deal with societal groups critical of democracy, which is of particular importance given the current rise of anti-system parties. As a secondary contribution of this research project, we aim to make the collected data publicly available to further research on democratic consolidation and political reform in Switzerland.
The project is funded by the Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften, the academy of sciences of the state of Baden-Württemberg as part of the WIN-Kolleg program. The project aims to provide insights into how slanted news media coverage impacts public debates and, in turn, affects collective decision making. News may be subtly biased through specific word choices or framing, intentional omissions or misrepresentation of specific details. In the most extreme cases, fake news may present entirely fabricated facts to intentionally manipulate public opinion towards a given topic. A rich diversity of opinions is desirable but systematically biased information, if not recognized as such, can be problematic as a basis for decision making. Therefore, it is crucial to empower news readers in recognizing relative biases in coverage by providing timely identification of media bias that can be delivered together with the actual news coverage – for example, through a specifically designed news aggregator platform. This project connects a long tradition of social science research on media bias with state-of-the-art methodology from computer science. The first part of the project centers around achieving rapid automated assessment of news media bias from a more technical, computer science point of view. The second, social science part of the project then is concerned with systematically studying how information about (relative) bias in the news could then be disseminated to enable – rather than to hinder – consensus formation and, in turn, collective decision making.