Uwe Serdült

Political polarization and popularity in online participatory media: an integrated approach

We present our approach to online popularity and its applications to political science, aiming at the creation of agent-based models that reproduce patterns of popularity in participatory media. We illustrate our approach analyzing a dataset from Youtube, composed of the view statistics and comments for the videos of the U.S. presidential campaigns of 2008 and 2012. Using sentiment analysis, we quantify the collective emotions expressed by the viewers, finding that democrat campaigns elicited more positive collective emotions than republican campaigns. Techniques from computational social science allow us to measure virality of the videos of each campaign, to find that democrat videos are shared faster but republican ones are remembered longer inside the community. Last we present our work in progress in voting advice applications, and our results analyzing the data from choose4greece.com. We show how we assess the policy differences between parties and their voters, and how voting advice applications can be extended to test our agent-based models.

Fifteen years of internet voting in Switzerland [History, Governance and Use]

This paper reviews the piecemeal introduction of internet voting in a highly federalised political setting, Switzerland. We trace the processes leading to the implementation of internet voting and the network of actors involved in its governance. In the empirical analysis we report usage patterns and take stock of what we know about the individual and socio-demographic profiles of internet voters.

Ideological and Temporal Components of Network Polarization in Online Political Participatory Media

Political polarization is traditionally analyzed through the ideological stances of groups and parties, but it also has a behavioral component that manifests in the interactions between individuals. We present an empirical analysis of the digital traces of politicians in politnetz.ch, a Swiss online platform focused on political activity, in which politicians interact by creating support links, comments, and likes. We analyze network polarization as the level of intra-party cohesion with respect to inter-party connectivity, finding that supports show a very strongly polarized structure with respect to party alignment. The analysis of this multiplex network shows that each layer of interaction contains relevant information, where comment groups follow topics related to Swiss politics. Our analysis reveals that polarization in the layer of likes evolves in time, increasing close to the federal elections of 2011. Furthermore, we analyze the internal social network of each party through metrics related to hierarchical structures, information efficiency, and social resilience. Our results suggest that the online social structure of a party is related to its ideology, and reveal that the degree of connectivity across two parties increases when they are close in the ideological space of a multi-party system.

Referendums in Switzerland

Direct democracy and federalism are the two most distinctive features of the Swiss political system. Even though the forces of modernity are pulling towards an increased integration and coordination between the state levels, and are finally leading to a centralization of competences, the administrative structure is still very much decentralized and the principle of subsidiarity held high. In the first half of the 19th century Switzerland was characterized by a high cultural, linguistic and religious diversity. The formation of the modern Swiss state was a rather turbulent one, including the occupation by French troops under Napoleon (1798) and a civil war between the predominantly liberal, Protestant cantons and the Catholic Sonderbund cantons1 campaigning for cantonal autonomy (1847). Switzerland is also a country that underwent a rather late but rapid industrialization process, which eventually culminated in the political crisis of the violent general strike of 1918. Due to the tensions between Switzerland’s rigid and highly fragmented territorial structure2 and the rapid evolution of governmental tasks, reform of the Swiss political system has been high on the political agenda ever since the late 1960s.

Questão,,Pública: first voting advice application in Latin America

Questao Publica was a Voting Advice Application website set up for the 2010 Senate elections in Brazil. Promoted by a consortium of Brazilian and international NGOs as well as universities, Questao Publica was not only a research but also a political initiative. The consortium understood Questao Publica as a complementary tool to reinforce transparency and accountability during an election campaign. The paper presents a description of this experience, of candidate and user response resps wellas a discussion of the main features of the Voting Advice Application. We furthermore report on technical aspects, the questionnaire, and the diffusion activities the consortium undertook to convince candidates to participate as well as to attract users.

Who are the Internet Voters

Assessing the influence that socio-economic characteristics have on the division between traditional voters and those who choose to vote via the internet is crucial to political debate as well as for the future development of democracies. Does the introduction of internet voting technology simply widen the divide between voters and non-voters, further isolating the part of the electorate already underrepresented in the political process? We address these issues by reviewing the current state of research in 22 empirical studies relating internet voting to socio-economic variables. The results are not homogeneous but suggest that although socio-economic factors do play an important role in explaining the choice of voting channel, they are strongly moderated by the general use of and trust in the internet.

THE HISTORY OF A DORMANT INSTITUTION: LEGAL NORMS AND THE PRACTICE OF RECALL IN SWITZERLAND

This article mainly fills a gap in the English-speaking literature on the recall in Switzerland in order to allow for future comparative work. After a historical introduction, the reasons for the introduction, institutional rules as well as practice of the recall are assembled in an inductive but systematic way. Currently the recall in Switzerland only exists in a minority of 6 of 26 cantons but not on the national level. The procedure is usually directed at parliament, the government or both. So far there was only one successful recall vote in the Canton of Aargau in the year 1862. This particular case is therefore described in more detail. Furthermore, a comprehensive overview of all recall attempts and votes is drawn up. As a conclusion stemming from the Swiss case, we can come up with three main functions the recall fulfils in a political system: (a) catharsis in case of scandals or mismanagement, (b) political weapon to gain public attention or to maximise votes in the next election, (c) indirect measure to oppose a contested policy.

Referendum Campaign Regulations in Switzerland

As is widely known, Switzerland’s political system includes important elements of direct citizen participation for the creation, change, and abolition of binding legal norms (Kriesi, 1993, 2005; Kaufmann et al. 2007; Under, 2007; Trechsel, 2007; Papadopoulous, 1998). However, most legislation is passed by Parliament without interference from the voters (roughly 95 per cent). In fact, most of the bills going through Parliament are prepared by the executive, namely the public administration. Hence, the literature often refers to the Swiss political system as being a semi-direct democracy.

Disentangling Digital Divide and Trust

In Switzerland internet voting is currently being introduced in a piecemeal fashion. Since the first trials in 2003 an increasing number of Swiss cantons is offering the digital voting channel to its citizens either living in Switzerland or abroad. So far the question whether the introduction of internet voting in Switzerland would increase the digital divide, favoring the well educated, economically better off citizens could not be answered in a conclusive way. As yet bi- and multi-variate regression analyses of survey data showed that general trust in the internet and in internet voting in particular outweigh the effect of the typical digital divide variables. There is, however, so far no study trying to disentangle the two types of variables by applying structural equation modeling. In the present study we test whether digital divide variables have a direct effect on general support of internet voting in the Swiss population or whether they should rather be treated as exogenous variables of general trust in the Internet and of internet voting in particular. We therefore put forward a structural equation model which helps us to disentangle direct and indirect effects on internet voting affinity. In order to test our model we are using the first Swiss population survey exclusively conducted on the topic of internet voting in April 2016.

Soziale Dimension des E-Voting

Mit E-Voting erhalt die Schweiz einen dritten Stimmkanal. Laut aktuellen Umfragen, befurworten fast alle jungen Menschen eine Moglichkeit online abzustimmen. Doch welche, zum Teil uberraschenden, sozialen Dimensionen hat E-Voting noch?