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.
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.
Please provide a summary
Digital technology promises to expand political participation, increase the efficiency of public administration, and make participation in public debates accessible to all. But this enthusiasm goes hand in hand with concerns that digital tools are being misused to manipulate public opinion, influence elections, and surveil people. Certain aspects of digital technology are problematic, but opinions differ as to what exactly the problems are, and what exactly the state should do. Fabrizio Gilardi and his team are developing new theories and methods relying on large amounts of data to identify the development and effects of different discourses regarding the digitalization of democracy. The findings will help us to understand how our societies deal with the consequences of digital technology in the political sphere.
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.
In Zurich, the TECHNO team consists of myself, Thomas Kurer and Reto Bürgisser TECHNO (2020-2024) addresses political consequences of rapid technological progress and explores how technological change in the workplace contributes to ongoing deep political transformations, the adoption of policies to address change, and the political consequences of such policies. The project should also result in recommendations of politically viable and effective policies to help workers and communities adapt to a fast-changing economic landscape and increased insecurity. The Project is a cooperation between four research teams, led by Prof. Henning Finseraas Institute for Social Research (Norway) Prof. Alex Kuo University of Oxford (UK) Prof. Aina Gallego Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals (Spain) Professor Silja Häusermann University of Zurich (Switzerland)