Das Zentrum für Demokratie (ZDA) der Universität Zürich erstellt im Auftrag des Bundesamtes für Statistik (BFS) eine Datenbank zu den kantonalen Parlaments- und Regierungswahlen, den Wahlen in den rund 130 Schweizer Städten, zu den Parteipositionen und den Gemeinderesultaten der nationalen Volksabstimmungen, sowie zu den Wahlen ins nationale Parlament.
Swiss Political Science Review (SPSR) aims to be a pluralist platform for advancing academic knowledge and debate in the field of political science, and in particular for developing intellectual exchange across traditional boundaries between its subfields and with its neighbouring disciplines. Accordingly, it publishes original and innovative work that makes a theoretical or empirical contribution to the study of political phenomena. SPSR encourages contributions from different theoretical and methodological approaches in order to further their mutual engagement.A fully refereed journal, SPSR publishes research and review articles, book reviews as well as special issues on selected topics. While open to submissions on all topics relevant to political science, SPSR particularly welcomes work engaging with changes in modes and structures of governance, and the challenges this presents for political actors and structures. Having its roots in Switzerland, SPSR is particularly interested in advancing knowledge on the implications of the embedding of national and domestic modes and structures of governance in international and transnational ones as well as issues such as federalism, direct democracy or consociational politics.
Nach jedem eidgenössischen Urnengang wird eine repräsentative Stichprobe von Bürgerinnen und Bürgern telefonisch befragt. Die Analysen der Antworten geben Aufschluss über die Gründe für die Stimmbeteiligung, sowie über die Motive für eine Ablehnung oder Annahme der Abstimmungsvorlagen. Alle Analyseberichte werden auf der Projekt-Website publiziert und die anonymisierten Daten werden für Sekundäranalysen zur Verfügung gestellt (www.voto.swiss).
In the policy-making process, Business has various means to influence policy, and because of its resources and its importance for the economy, it has a distinct advantage compared to other interest groups. Nevertheless, Business does not always win policy debates. This project looks at the sources of the structural power of Business and its limits. It analyzes how much policymakers – in particular city mayors – privilege the concerns of Business over other policy goals. And it analyzes important policy instances – such as the establishment of deposit-insurance schemes – in which consumer interests won out over the interests of Business.
Die Topkader der Bundesverwaltung haben einen massgeblichen Einfluss auf die Förderung von Sprachgruppen und der Mehrsprachigkeit in der Bundesverwaltung. Das Forschungsprojekt will diese Personen zu ihrer Sichtweise über die Herausforderungen einer mehrsprachigen Verwaltung befragen, sowie über ihre Haltung zu den Massnahmen bezüglich Förderung der Mehrsprachigkeit in der Bundesverwaltung. Dabei verfolgt das Forschungsprojekt zwei konkrete Ziele: Erstes Ziel ist es, die Einstellungen von Mitgliedern des Topkaders gegenüber dem Sprachmanagement in ihrer Verwaltungseinheit zu eruieren und die Faktoren zu bestimmen, welche diese Einstellungen beeinflussen. Zweites Ziel ist es, zu untersuchen wie die Mitglieder des Topkaders ihre Handlungsspielräume nutzen zur Verbesserung der Sprachkompetenzen von Mitarbeitenden, zur Förderung von Mehrsprachigkeit in Verwaltungseinheiten (Arbeits-, Redaktions- und Verständigungssprachen), sowie zur verstärkten Rekrutierung und Beförderung von Angehörigen der Sprachminderheiten.
Based on a survey among Swiss citizens, the study analyses the attitudes towards public regulations in Switzerland. The results show that public regulations have, although regularly criticized in political debate, in general a high level of acceptance, especially in the fields of health and environment. The Swiss population is quite satisfied with the level of regulation although there is as well scepticism about the administrative burden produced by public interventions.
International trade and its distributional consequences have been portrayed both as causes of greater political stability as well as a disruptive forces fueling widespread discontent and social unrest. At the heart of this controversy is the question of who wins and loses from international trade and how people react to these distributional changes. Especially in the context of developing and emerging countries we know little about individual level effects of trade openness. Adding to that, it is scarcely taken into account how people perceive of these objective distributional consequences. When are individuals satisfied or frustrated with their welfare development and how, if so, do they react to these changes? The project aims to contribute to these pending issues by clearly identifying winners and losers based onnew new trade theory. I argue, based on new trade models, that objective economic consequences are unevenly distributed depending on a combination of individual skill-level and exposure to international competition. These distributive consequences drive wedges within formerly cohesive, same-skilled groups. Building on these distributional effects I specify how individuals subjectively assess their welfare and set out the conditions that induce economic grievances. The mechanism at the heart of the breeding process of grievances is the evaluation of economic welfare based on comparison to similar others. As within-group wage disparity increases, a rising number of individuals are systematically frustrated with the result of their welfare evaluation. Thus, trade can also influence the satisfaction of non-exposed individuals by impacting the income of relevant comparison units. In general, economic grievances induce political discontent, as blame for this adverse economic situation is attributed to the outside. Individuals consequently oppose economic policies, distrust economic institutions and take part in protest activities. The project encompasses a paper testing the individual welfare predictions of new new trade theory and the link to subjective perceptions of well-being with South African panel data. Furthermore, it aims to test the importance of comparison to others with similar abilities and the translation of grievances into political discontent with a survey experiment.
SNF Grant100017_159341; CHF 348’553.-, main applicant with Denise Traber, Thomas Kurer and Michael Pinggera Under what conditions can welfare states be reformed? More specifically: how can established social policy programmes be adapted to changing demographic, economic and social constraints? These are the key questions in today’s welfare state politics, and they have consequently become the key questions in political science research on the welfare state. In this research project, we made use of the exceptional conjunction of theoretical advances in the relevant literature, methodological innovation in public opinion research and the unfolding of the most ambitious and encompassing pension reform in Switzerland in decades to provide answers to precisely these questions With regard to the literature on welfare state reforms, one of the key insights of research over the past decade has been that welfare politics are multidimensional. This means that individuals are not just “in favor or against social policy”, but they hold specific preferences for different aspects of social policy. One major difficulty – for researchers as well as policy-makers – is, however, that the relative importance that individuals or social groups attribute to these different dimensions is almost impossible to observe reliably in standard survey analysis. Conjoint analysis is an experimental survey method that allows to measure whether changes in the composition of a reform package lead to sizeable shifts in support among the public as a whole, or among specific groups. The Swiss pension reform “Altersvorsorge 2020” was an ambitious attempt at reforming the entire system of old age income protection. It therefore provided the perfect opportunity to combine the insights in welfare state theory regarding multidimensionality with conjoint analysis. We conducted a panel study which accompanied the political reform process.
This project examines disintegration referenda, that is referenda aimed at the partial or full withdrawal of individual member states from international institutions, which present a new but growing challenge to international cooperation. This project aims at improving our understanding how disintegration referendums challenge existing institutions and the remaining member states, and how they respond to such referendums. It focuses both on the actions of foreign governments during the referendum campaign and on how the negotiating processes and outcomes surrounding the negotiation process following a successful disintegration referendum affect regime stability by influencing domestic politics and public opinion in the remaining member states. Its theoretical contribution lies in conceptualizing disintegration referenda as a specific type of sovereignty referendum that confronts international institutions and their remaining members with a trade-off between economic prosperity and regime stability. Empirically, the project focuses on disintegration referenda in Greece, the UK, and Switzerland.
Why do some governments compensate losers for the adverse effects of trade, while others reward winners, often exacerbating distributive conflict and inequality? A standard view in the literature is that trade leads to greater demand and supply of social policy. But this explanation cannot account for the striking policy differences across countries for given levels of trade exposure. I argue that economic geography and electoral institutions condition the effect of trade exposure on compensation. Trade leads to greater compensation when losers are geographically concentrated and politicians have incentives to target specific constituencies. Relative to geographically dispersed trade losers, concentrated losers constitute attractive targets for politicians elected in small electoral districts. This conditional theory contrasts with views positing a generalized relationship between trade and welfare spending.