Topic for all departments of the Centre for Democracy Studies Aarau
Overarching questions arise that concern all three disciplines and bring them together in discourse. How should societies form opinions and make decisions in the face of increasingly complex and transformative challenges? What innovative processes can produce effective and legitimate responses to problem areas such as climate change or artificial intelligence? To what extent can they help overcome the crisis of representation in existing democratic institutions? Can they contribute to the depolarization of political debate? Under what circumstances do they contribute to the renewal and strengthening of political trust? And what role can they play in formulating and implementing effective solutions to current social challenges and problems?
From a political science perspective, it is important to continue pursuing existing research questions. How do democratic innovations arise, who introduces them, and why? How do they relate to the traditional institutions of representative and direct democracy? Under what conditions do processes of good deliberative quality arise? How are democratic innovations perceived by political actors? How are they assessed by the general population? What is their added value in political and democratic practice? How can they contribute to the further development and improvement of democracy? What models of institutionalization exist, and what are their opportunities and risks?
From the perspective of political education, a number of relevant questions can also be examined. How can concepts of political education be implemented in processes of deliberative democracy? What can moderators in deliberative processes learn from dealing with controversy and from the Beutelsbach Consensus? How can learning and exchange phases in citizens’ assemblies be designed didactically in such a way that they address the different prerequisites of the participating citizens and at the same time promote the judgmental competence of all participants? To what extent can such and other participatory processes strengthen democratic values among young people? What significance do digital communication channels, online research, and the associated opinion-forming processes have in this context? In view of society’s concern about the political participation of young people, these questions are of great social
relevance.
Projects
The Democratizing Just Sustainability Transitions (DUST) project aims to develop new participatory tools for sustainability transitions that strengthen citizen participation and trust in democratic governance.
It seeks to recognize the voices of the least engaged communities, with a focus on structurally weak regions that are dependent on energy-intensive industries and will be most affected by sustainability transitions.
The goal is to support the implementation of place-based policies for just sustainability transitions at scale that increase citizen participation and trust in democratic governance, especially in the least engaged communities.
Members of all eight Swiss university political science institutes and the Liechtenstein Institute are involved in SDD-21. The project aims to contribute to the integration of voting research in Switzerland. Thanks to innovative questions, methods and collected data, it should also strengthen the international visibility of Swiss political science. Due to the fact that direct democracy is currently on the rise worldwide, it can be assumed that the results of the project will attract lively international interest.
Direct democracy plays a central role in the public debate in Switzerland. Following referendums, the motives of citizens in particular are at the center of interest. In this context, SDD-21 also aims to make a socially relevant contribution by making findings on current issues accessible to the media and the general public.
This project investigates the ability of artificial intelligence (AI), specifically large language models (LLMs), to emulate human deliberative reasoning—a cognitive process fundamental to democratic and sustainable decision-making.
The AI4Deliberation project aims to develop and test AI-enabled tools and processes to facilitate large-scale deliberations in public decision-making.