Externe Untersuchung der Wahl- und Abstimmungsprozesse der Stadt St.Gallen
Scientific support to the Federal Chancellary. Gola is to identify and pilot potential measures to increase the integrity of the direct democratic signature process. The goal is to identify instruments that do not require new laws or changes to existing laws but that can be rolled out immediately.
Representative democracies in Europe face demands for more democratic participation and more efficient and effective policy making at the same time coming from the populist and technocratic challenges, as well as simultaneous demands for regional devolution and supra-national integration. As a result, they have been under pressure to reform for some time. As a systematic and theoretically driven repository of such reforms is missing, the project aims to produce a dataset of reforms of representative institutions and processes aimed at enhancing both citizen inclusion and policy effectiveness. Based on a typology of areas of reforms (electoral systems, legislative procedures, participatory rights, legislative−executive relations, etc.), reforms are classified and linked to the dimensions of representation they target, such as inclusion, responsiveness, responsibility, accountability among others.
The dataset covers all member-states of the European Union as well as Norway, Switzerland and the United Kingdom up to 2022, and links up with data from a past endeavour at EUDO (the forerunner of EGPP), within the SIEPOL (Seclusion and Inclusion in the European Polity) project, directed by Peter Mair and Camille Bedock. The project, directed by Daniele Caramani, has received funding from the Research Council of the EUI.
DE: Die menschenrechtlichen Beschwerdemechanismen der Vereinten Nationen ermöglichen Menschen auf der ganzen Welt, ihre nationalen Regierungen für Menschenrechtsverletzungen anzuklagen. Dieses Forschungsprojekt hat systematisch untersucht, welche Faktoren beeinflussen, ob Opfer von Menschenrechtsverletzungen Individualbeschwerden bei den Vereinten Nationen einreichen und welche Effekte diese Beschwerden auf die Menschenrechtssituationen in ihren Ländern haben. Die Forschungsergebnisse zeigen, dass Opfer von Menschenrechtsverletzungen mit niedrigerem sozioökonomischem Status häufig keine Beschwerden einreichen, weil sie die Mechanismen nicht kennen oder weil ihnen die notwendigen Sprachkenntnisse fehlen. Sozioökonomische Eliten sind systematisch überrepräsentiert in den Menschenrechtsbeschwerden an die Vereinten Nationen. Ausserdem zeigen die Forschungsergebnisse, dass diese Beschwerdemechanismen zur Verbesserung der Menschenrechtslage beitragen können, dass es aber in vielen Staaten auch repressive Vergeltung gegen zivilgesellschaftliche Organisationen gibt, die Beschwerden gegen ihre Regierung einreichen. Die Forschungsergebnisse legen nahe, dass Beschwerdeführer von den Vereinten Nationen besser geschützt und anonym gehalten werden müssen, um sie vor repressiver Vergeltung zu schützen.
EN: The United Nations’ human rights complaints mechanism enables people from across the world to submit complaints against their national governments. This research project systematically examined which factors influence whether victims of human rights violations submit a complaint to the UN, and what effects such complaints have on the human rights situation in their countries.
The findings show that victims of human rights violations with lower socioeconomic status often do not file complaints because they are unaware of the mechanism or lack the required language skills. Socioeconomic elites are systematically overrepresented in human rights complaints submitted to the UN.
Although the findings show that the complaints mechanisms can lead to improvements in human rights, in many states there is also repressive retaliation against civil society organisations that file complaints against their governments. The findings further suggest that complainants must be better protected by the UN and kept anonymous in order to protect them from retaliatory repression.
The attitudes of the population towards (public) regulation are the focus of the present study. It is a follow-up study to the 2016 and 2020 analyses of the attitudes of the Swiss population to public regulation (Höglinger/Widmer 2016; Milic/Widmer 2021) and is again based on a population survey.
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.
The impact of digitalization on politics, the media environment, and democratic processes in Switzerland is potentially far reaching, yet remains poorly understood. Media usage has moved online, political debates are being shaped by online campaigns, and the perception of the importance of data protection has shifted massively, changing people’s attitudes about what services the government or private service providers should offer as evidenced by the recent eID referendum. Studying these kinds of questions systematically requires surveys that specifically track population attitudes and behaviors related to digitalization and its consequences. DigiVox is a national survey panel specifically dedicated to the study of the social, economic, cultural, political and policy implications of digital media and their interplay with technological developments in Switzerland. The project is supported by infrastructure funding of the Digitalisierungsinitiative der Zürcher Hochschulen (DIZH), the UZH Digital Society Initiative (DSI), and the University of Zurich. In addition to a recurring set of questions that we ask on each survey, through a competitive process, scholars have the opportunity to buy space on the instrument to ask their own questions.
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