The Federal Chancellery is currently developing a "Dashboard Political Affairs" designed to provide federal employees with efficient access to information on the status of ongoing federal affairs. The dashboard draws information from various existing databases. In order to structure and classify the available information, a finely detailed process structure differentiated by type of affair is required.
The project "Simplify! Improving social services through a generative translation tool for plain/simple language: Validation of its use for social welfare clients, implementation principles and assessment of its impact on benefit uptake" is funded by the Digitalization Initiative of the Zurich Higher Education Institutions (DIZH).
It addresses non take-up of social welfare benefits due to language and administrative barriers. The project will develop an AI tool to translate complex welfare documents into plain language. And we will then validate the tool’s effectiveness, design real-world implementations and evaluate its impact on benefit uptake through field experiments.
The project is carried out as a collaboration between the team of Rainer Gabriel at ZHAW's School of Social Work and the team of Karsten Donnay at UZH's Department of Political Science. And we are very happy to be working with the Social Welfare Department of the Canton of Zurich, Amt für Zusatzleistungen (AZL) and the Social Services of the city of Zurich, the Social Services of the city of Dietikon and Pro Senectute Canton Zurich as our practice and implementation partners.
Governments traditionally represent national interests in international politics, but how horizontal inequalities and minority representation extend beyond the nation-state remains less clear. Parliamentary delegations offer a unique channel through which non-majority perspectives can be amplified on the international stage. These delegations signal which citizens—and which inequalities—are acknowledged in International Organizations and Global Governance Networks. The project examines how political regimes and parties in the Global North and Global South shape and deploy parliamentary delegations for strategic representation. Understanding these dynamics is crucial for grasping how states respond to shifts in inequality and how contestation and politicization unfold in global governance. Using attendance data, text analysis of summit speeches, and elite interviews with delegation members, this study investigates how countries choose which forms of inequality to highlight—or ignore—at three key international cooperation forums: BRICS (plus), the OECD, and the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU). The working hypothesis suggests that economic organizations such as the OECD (a Global North hegemon) and BRICS (a Global South challenger) rarely represent or politicize inequalities between member states. Instead, inequalities are often accepted as structural realities rather than actively addressed through parliamentary delegations. In contrast, the IPU, as a global parliamentary forum, provides a space where both global and horizontal inequalities are strategically represented and contested, reflecting the role of non-majoritarian interests across different political regimes. By examining economic, political, and cultural inequalities, this project contributes to a deeper understanding of the strategic representation and contestation of global inequalities in international politics.
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.
Online-Plattformen haben die politische Diskussion verändert, indem sie einerseits mehr Menschen eine Stimme geben, andererseits aber auch schädliche Inhalte wie Hassreden verbreiten. Diese Inhalte beeinflussen die Gesellschaft und Politik negativ. Das Ziel dieses Projekts ist es, die Qualität der Online-Diskussion zu verbessern, indem sowohl schädliche als auch konstruktive Inhalte untersucht werden. Wir definieren schädliche Inhalte als respektlose und beleidigende Beiträge, die persönliche Angriffe oder diskriminierende Sprache enthalten. Konstruktive Inhalte fördern hingegen positive Diskussionen und demokratische Beteiligung.
Das Projekt verfolgt zwei Hauptziele: die Entwicklung von Methoden zur Erkennung schädlicher und konstruktiver Inhalte sowie die Bewertung der Wirksamkeit von Massnahmen zur Reduzierung schädlicher Inhalte und zur Förderung konstruktiver Dialoge. Unsere Forschung umfasst drei Arbeitsbereiche: die Entwicklung und Messung von Erkennungsmethoden, die Bewertung von Massnahmen gegen schädliche Inhalte und die Untersuchung von Massnahmen zur Förderung konstruktiver Inhalte.
Wir arbeiten mit Schweizer Nachrichtenportalen wie Blick und 20 Minuten zusammen und analysieren Daten von Plattformen wie Twitter und Reddit. Das Projekt adressiert Herausforderungen wie die zuverlässige Inhaltserkennung und den Zugang zu Daten und hat entsprechende Massnahmen zur Risikominderung getroffen. Insgesamt wird unser Projekt wertvolle Erkenntnisse und neue Methoden liefern, um die Online-Diskussion zu verbessern und schädliche Inhalte zu reduzieren. Dies wird Forscher:innen, zivilgesellschaftlichen Gruppen und politischen Entscheidungsträgern helfen.
Dissertation Project
Party polarization—or the degree to which political parties disagree ideologically—is now multidimensional in most European democracies. Continuing to rely on a single left-right dimension risks obscuring an increasingly complex and fragmented political landscape. But what are the consequences of multidimensional polarization for the functioning of democracy? This project seeks to answer that question by [1] mapping multidimensional polarization among political parties across Europe (1970–present), and analyzing its consequences for [2] political engagement (e.g., voter turnout) and [3] partisan hostility. It will do so using a combination of innovative statistical methods, observational analyses, and experimental research designs.
The UZH faculties have taken a variety of measures to reduce flight-related greenhouse gas emissions. These range from quotas, incentive taxes and monitoring to compensation solutions. The evaluation project aims to assess the various measures. Different dimensions are assessed, such as the level of information on the measures, their acceptance, and their effects on the travel behavior and climate awareness of UZH members. The evaluation is based on guided interviews with those responsible for the measures and on the development of impact models for the different measures. Furthermore, the evaluation project is based on an analysis of existing data on the travel behavior of UZH members and on a standardized online survey of UZH members. Finally, the experiences with the implementation of the measures are collected in supplementary interviews. Based on the findings, the project formulates recommendations for the attention of decision makers in the faculties and the UZH. However, the significance of this project extends beyond UZH. It can serve as a model for other educational institutions and organizations pursuing similar emission reduction goals. Finally, the findings obtained in this evaluation project contribute to the scientific debate on the question of the acceptance and effectiveness of corresponding measures.
Development of a new ensemble classifier that outperforms existing MrP (multilevel regression with poststratification) approaches. This project builds on the prior work (Broniecki et al. 2022, https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/714777) and will improve upon "autoMrP" (https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/autoMrP/index.html).
The ERC Advanced Grant project GLOBAL applies cleavage theory to the international arena and investigates political oppositions at the global level. Treating the globe as one system, it analyses the cleavages that structure world politics and asks whether conflicts are shaped territorially or along functional alignments cutting across world regions.
The long-term empirical analysis from the 19th century to the present aims to establish if, and under what conditions, international divisions opposing world regions – core−periphery, North−South, or civilisational contrasts – change and are replaced by conflict lines that oppose groups that identify, link organizationally and act in solidarity across borders (classes, educational groups, generations, genders, as well as value groups). The project categorises cleavages according to three types of inequality that lead to global oppositions: economic, political-military and socio-cultural.
The investigation is carried out at the level of citizens, actors and institutions. GLOBAL combines comparative and supra-national approaches that look at the politics of inequality, i.e. how actors compete to politicize more or less equitable redistribution of rights and resources across world regions and across transnational groups. A research strategy based on statistics, scaling techniques, large language models and network analysis is used to explore electoral results, legislations, cleavages, roll-call votes, text produced by actors, individual surveys and organizational data.
Led by Daniele Caramani as Principal Investigator and hosted at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies (European University Institute), GLOBAL will lead to an authored book on the globalization of politics, collective volumes and journal articles by the research team, as well as working papers by associated researchers.