Dieses Gutachten erörtert mögliche Konsequenzen einer Annahme der Volksinitiative „Für die Stärkung der Volksrechte in der Aussenpolitik (Staatsverträge vors Volk!)“, welche im Jahre 2009 eingereicht wurde. Konkret werden folgende vier Fragen beantwortet: Das Gutachten soll folgende vier Fragen beantworten: 1. Welches sind die heute bestehenden Mitsprachemöglichkeiten von Volk und Ständen beim Abschluss von Staatsverträgen? Wie wurden die bestehenden direktdemokratischen Instrumente bisher genutzt und mit welchem Ergebnis? 2. In welchem Verhältnis stehen die in der Initiative vorgesehenen neuen Mitsprachemöglichkeiten zu den bereits bestehenden? Mit wie vielen zusätzlichen Abstimmungen ist zu rechnen? 3. Wie wirkt sich die Durchführung von zusätzlichen Abstimmungen auf die Stimmbürgerinnen und Stimmbürger aus? Führt eine Erhöhung der Anzahl Abstimmungen zu Abstimmungsmüdigkeit und somit zu einer sinkenden Stimmbeteiligung? Führen zusätzliche Abstimmungen zu einer Überforderung der Stimmbürgerinnen und Stimmbürger bei der Meinungsbildung und somit zu einer verminderten Qualität des Stimmentscheids? 4. Welcher Mehraufwand entsteht durch die Erhöhung der Anzahl Abstimmungen? Welche zusätzlichen administrativen Kosten entstehen für die Behörden? Wie wirken sich Mehrabstimmungen auf die Bereitschaft von Medien und politischen Parteien aus, sich in der öffentlichen Debatte zu engagieren? Die Resultate des Gutachtens sind publiziert worden (siehe Weblinks unten).
This research project aims to assess the impact of various policy options in the primary education sector in the sub-Saharan country of Senegal. As Senegal faces similar problems as many other developing countries in the region and beyond, the results promise to be relevant on a broader scale. Typical features of sub-Saharan primary schools, especially in francophone Africa, are high repetition and drop-out rates, under-provision of material inputs like textbooks, badly educated teachers, widespread teacher absenteeism and very low performance of students in international student achievement tests. Nevertheless, numerous studies have consistently estimated high returns to primary education in developing countries. To improve quality and quantity of primary education in these countries, it is important to understand which factors influence the features mentioned and which policies in this area are most cost-effective. We will, therefore, focus on the following research questions: - What are the determinants of drop-out, in particular what role plays school quality for the decision to drop out? Which effects does drop-out have on human capital in the medium run? - What is the impact of the wide spread and expensive practice of grade repetition on later achievement and drop-out? What are the determinants of repetition? - Which material inputs, like textbooks, have a positive impact on student achievement and in which grades are they most effective? - What role does teacher education play for student achievement and is it a good idea to let better educated teachers only teach in higher grades or would it be more efficient to let them teach in lower grades as well? Analyses of the effectiveness of various inputs in the education system, especially in developing countries, often face the difficulty of not having any information on initial ability differences between students. Therefore, they cannot properly address the issue of selection bias which arises if initial ability (which affects achievement) is correlated with the other inputs. Time series cross section data can help to solve this problem as it allows controlling for earlier achievement as a proxy for schooling inputs earlier in time and ability differences. We have a panel data set for primary students from Senegal in which students were interviewed and tested from 1995 to 2000. In addition, teachers and directors were interviewed. The student data can be matched with additional information from complementary household surveys carried out by researchers from Cornell University (USA) and INRA (France). This makes our data set unique and allows us to address issues that could not be addressed in this way before. Especially the effects of drop-out and repetition in developing countries have not been studied much as longitudinal data is extremely scarce, especially for Africa. We will use quasi-experimental methods to match students who did and did not repeat/drop out on the basis of achievement before repetition/drop-out and further characteristics and then estimate treatment effects. Regarding inputs to primary education, like textbooks and teacher education, we will focus on the variation of effects over time, i.e., over grades, which allows us to give more precise policy advice on the optimal use of these inputs.
This projects funds an institutional partnership between the Institute of Political Science at the University of Zurich, and the Graduate School of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing. The objective of the institutional partnership is to better understand, explain and address problems of governance and administration of megacities outside the OECD context. China is a privileged region to study this topic, as it hosts not less than three of the world’s twenty two megacities, i.e. urban regions with a population of at least 10 million. The activities include two three-day workshops, held in Zurich (in August 2011) and in Beijing (in August 2012), as well as a one month visit of a Chinese faculty member in Zurich (in May 2013). The immediate output of the partnership will be the publication of a joint book on the problems and prospects of effective megacity governance in Europe and China. Furthermore, we expect the institutional partnership to provide the opportunity for further cooperation in three fields, namely (1) the formulation of a joint research project on metropolitan transformations in China, (2) the setting up of a joint summer school on the topic of governance and administration of megacities, as well as (3) further faculty and staff exchange in the respective programmes of continuing education. The applicants, Proff. Dong Lisheng and Daniel Kübler, first met in 2003, in the framework of an international collaborative project supported by the French CNRS. They have maintained contact, and met several times since then. The institutional partnership suggested here would give the opportunity to further strengthen and deepen the dialogue between their respective research groups, and set the base for further collaboration in the future.
There have been few analyses of voting behavior in cantonal parliaments to date. Since 2007, however, the Zurich cantonal parliament has employed an electronic voting system. Though this makes it possible to examine the voting behavior of individual parliamentarians over time, such information has thus far not been used for political science analysis. The proposal here, therefore, is to systematically analyze this electronically recorded data during the 2011 - 2015 and 2015 - 2019 legislative sessions. Concepts and methods previously developed for analyzing parliamentary behavior will be used for evaluating the data. The primary focus is on analyzing the maintenance of party discipline (or ‘upholding the party line’) within parliamentary factions. In other words, the focus is on the ‘coherence’ of voting behavior among members of parliamentary party groupings. The key question is what can explain notable deviations or difficulties in maintaining the party line. The existing literature suggests divergence could be due to individual characteristics of the parliamentarians, aspects or characteristics of the particular issues at hand, or to factors inherent to the parliamentary party groups themselves. Other issues raised in previous research on parliaments will also be addressed.
Swiss municipalities are important actors in the policy domains of housing and elderly people. Hence the success of privately initiated housing project for elderly people depends essentially on the role, the decisions and the policies of municipalities. This study analyzes the role of municipalities in the development process of such projects. More precisely the research investigates 1) the policy instruments municipalities are relying on, 2) how municipalities behave confronted with housing projects initiated by citizens and 3) how municipalities perceive their role as regards such projects.
In face of the rapidly increasing amount of greenhouse gas emissions from developing countries, international transfer of low-carbon technologies to these countries is undoubtedly the key to combating global climate change. Focusing on private-sector transfer of wind energy technologies, this research aims to examine how the processes of international technology transfer can be made more effective. Guiding research questions are: 1) to what extent does the competitiveness of the wind energy industry in developing countries depend on the localized accumulation of innovation capacity and on the transfer of foreign sources of innovation?; 2) how do technology-push and demand-pull policies influence technology acquisition strategies of the wind energy industry in developing countries?; and 3) what is the impact of various technology acquisition strategies on the development of technological capability of the wind energy industry in the developing world? In answering these questions, this research draws on theories of organizational learning, innovation systems and public policies or technological change, and uses a combination of statistical analysis and interview-based case studies. The results of this research will contribute to an improved understanding of where to locate innovation activities for enhancing the competitiveness of the wind energy industry in developing countries, what policies are necessary for the effective acquisition of foreign technologies by these industries, and how to facilitate the development of local technological capability through technology acquisitions. A better understanding on these issues helps developing countries formulate strategies for pursuing more sustainable, low-carbon development paths.
We worked on the dualization of labor markets and welfare states in Western democracies. We wanted to know to what extent, why and with which political and electoral consequences post-industrial societies become more and more divided in insiders and outsiders. Work in this project is situated in two institutional contexts: a) The project was linked the the EU Network of Excellence „Reconciling Work and Welfare RECWOWE“. From the collaborative research in this project, we published the book „The Age of Dualization. The Changing Face of Inequality in Deindustrializing Societies“ (2012, OUP). I am a co-editor, together with Profs. Patrick Emmenegger, Bruno Palier and Martin Seeleib-Kaiser. The book shows that dualization of labor markets and societies is not a mere structural trend, but rather the result of political decisions. b) On dualization, I also worked with Hanna Schwander (University of Bremen) and Thomas Kurer (UZH), on the SNF-project „Who is in and who is out? The political representation of insiders and outsiders in Western Europe“ of which I am the main applicant (2011-2013, Grant number 100017_131994; 138’800.- CHF). Inequality is on the rise in almost all Western European countries for the first time in more than five decades. To scholars of comparative political economy, this does not come as a surprise, since both the flexibilization of labor markets as well as welfare state retrenchment have been major trends in the policy development of these countries since the 1980s. These reforms, in combination with de-industrialization and sluggish economic growth have led to an increasing division of the working class into labor market insiders and outsiders. Labor market insiders hold standard, protected and stable jobs, while outsiders are marginally or atypically employed, and more likely to be unemployed. The determinants, structure and outcomes of dualization are increasingly well researched by sociologists and economists. However, we still know relatively little about the extent of dualization across countries, about the politics of dualization and about policy feedback. We investigate how deep the divide between insiders and outsiders has become in different European countries, whether this divide impacts on the democratic process and which policy feedbacks result from it. Key questions are the following: What is dualization and how can we measure it? Who are the insiders and outsiders across different countries? Do we see differences in the levels of participation and party choices of insiders and outsiders? What are the policy preferences of these groups? Are outsiders mobilized by radical right-wing or left-wing parties? What policies do these parties advocate? In this project, we combine the analysis of a variety of data sources (household panel data, comparative survey data, coded media content analysis) in order to contribute to the understanding of one of the most acute and salient topics that West European societies need to deal with in the current context of crisis and austerity, namely how to distribute increasingly scarce resources between different segments of the society.
The Department of Political Science (IPZ) and the Institute of Mass Communication and Media Research (IPMZ), both part of the University of Zurich, have evaluated the “Communication strategy for the prevention of seasonal flu 2008-2012” (“Kommunikationsstrategie zur Prävention der saisonalen Grippe 2008-2012”) on behalf of the Swiss Federal Office of Public Health (FOPH). This communication strategy has two threads. On the one hand, it seeks to directly encourage the end addressees to get vaccinated (for their own protection and that of others) via the use of educational material such as posters and brochures. On the other hand, it seeks to indirectly influence these end addressees through message multipliers (such as doctors and the mass media). The question of whether this communication strategy reached its intended end addressees and multipliers is of central importance to the evaluation. The findings indicate that the communication strategy has (so far) failed to achieve its objectives concerning the end addressees: a ten-year comparison shows a considerable fall in uptake among the at-risk groups who were encouraged to get themselves vaccinated for their own protection. Also, uptake among medical and health-care professionals as well as among individuals in close contact with the at-risk groups is insufficient to ensure the protection of others. In contrast, most of the multiplier-related objectives were achieved. On the basis of these findings, the evaluation formulates recommendations for the design of a follow-up strategy starting as from 2012/13.
This project examines how individuals respond to financial crises. It includes studies on the effect of foreign currency lending on individual political opinions in Eastern Europe, survey-research in Greece, and individual-level studies on public opinion during the 2008-10 Latvian financial and economic crisis. In a collaborative effort with colleagues from the University of York, Oxford University and IE University, we have run several surveys of public opinion on crisis management and the euro in Greece (July 2015, September 2015, December 2015, and February 2017).
This project in the framework of the Swiss Electoral Studies (Selects) analyzes the dynamics of the voting decision process in the campaign of the 2011 National Council elections. To this end, the project relies on the rolling cross-section (RCS) component of the Selects study – the first of its kind in the framework of an election campaign in Switzerland. The questions at the centre of this PhD project are how party strategies, media content, and campaign events influence the way in which citizens assess parties and form their voting intention.