e-democracy

Digital technologies influence and challenge democracy at all levels - local, regional, national and supra-national - and in all its forms - elections, voting, initiatives, campaigns, surveys, on-line platforms, measuring instruments. In Switzerland, e-voting is important, with the ongoing pilot projects in Geneva, Neuchâtel and Zurich, the guidance by the federal government and its dissemination in other cantons.

e-Democracy (2012-2016)

In several Swiss cantons, pilot schemes are set up to establish e-voting. Switzerland is one of the pioneers worldwide in this field. In the research project «e-Democracy», an interdisciplinary team (political science, law and communication studies) analyses the effects of different forms of e-democracy and e-voting specifically on the political process and direct democracy.

The experiences and debates in three Swiss cantons will be critically evaluated and compared with international developments. Some of the research will focus on the question of whether e-voting influences participation and political communication (i.e. campaigns).

As a secondary topic, the project will cover voting advice applications (VAAs) such as smartvote and ZDA’s own application «Preference Matcher» (Website c2d). These platforms in the internet allow voters to compare their political positions with those of political parties.

The research is based on past projects at the e-Democracy Centre at the Centre for Democracy Studies Aarau (ZDA) and will allow ZDA to get one of the leading centres in the field of e-Democracy.

project leader: Uwe Serdült
project collaborators: Andreas Auer, Fernando Mendez
further information (project database c2d)

Emotions and Polarization in Online Participatory Media

The proliferation of online participatory media such as social networking sites has transformed the public space in the Internet by allowing citizens to engage in discussions as well as to share and to contribute content. On one hand these developments represent an opportunity for ongoing democratization, on the other hand political discourse seems to change towards a culture with more polarized viewpoints. The goal of this interdisciplinary project is to study under which conditions positive or negative emotions in online discussions are amplifying polarization. We address this question by analyzing large-scale data sets as well as agent-based modeling.
Financed by Swiss National Science Foundation.

Project leaders: Prof. F. Schweitzer (ETHZ, main applicant),
U. Serdült (ZDA, co-applicant)
further information (project database c2d)

Preference Matcher - mapping political parties and citizens' preferences

This is an applied research project initiated by researchers at the C2D in 2010 to develop a software application - a Preference Matcher- for allowing citizens to better define their subjective political preferences during an electoral campaigns. The data gathered by the online tool is then used for research purposes such as mapping the ideological positions political parties across the electoral space as well as measuring the cohesiveness of political parties and their core supporters.

So far we run experiments and application for the following electoral events:

• UK General Elections May 2010
• Brazilian Presidential and Senate  Elections October 2010
• Greek Regional Elections November 2010

project leader: Fernando Mendez, Uwe Serdült
project collaborators: Vasiliki Triga, Yanina Welp, Jonathan Wheatley, Micha Germann
further information (project database c2d)

Past projects

• baloti.ch - An Internet Voting Platform for Swiss Migrants
  (project database c2d)
  project leader: Uwe Serdült