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.
Please add a summary
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.
Does terrorism affect citizens' preference for democracy? I study the effect of terrorist attacks on preference for democracy in an event-study-like setting, by comparing reported preference for democracy shortly before and after terrorist attacks in several African countries. Alleviating the general concern that experiencing terrorism compromises preference for democracy, I document an average increase in preference for democracy. About 8% of those not preferring democracy are persuaded in favor of democracy. I find that the effect is particularly pronounced among individuals who evaluate their state as undemocratic. For individuals perceiving their state as democratic I find no adverse reaction to democracy. The empirical results are robust to a number of tests, including a correction for spatial confounding, which is a so far unaddressed issue in similar empirical setups. Preference change can be seen as a mechanism in the economic theory of political transition.
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.