Contextual Factors and the Spatial Model of Electoral Competition

Principal investigator. Project financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation (Ambizione Fellowship). 2009 – 2012.

This project examines how institutions and politics influence the voting decision process. It investigates how the determinants of party choice vary across elections and how they are influenced by the decision context (party system characteristics, electoral institutions, etc.). Elections represent one of the most important links between citizens and government. By examining how politics and institutions affect citizens’ decision-making, this project will improve our understanding of elections. It will also help in determining under which institutional and political conditions a system of democratic representation works most efficiently.

Making Electoral Democracy Work

Co-investigator (principal investigator: André Blais, University of Montreal). Research project financed by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. 2009 – 2016. (Project homepage)

This project investigates how electoral rules and the electoral context influence the dynamic and reciprocal relationships between voters. It is a seven-year project covering 27 elections in five countries (Canada, France, Germany, Spain, Switzerland). The causal processes through which the rules of the game affect the behaviour of both parties and voters will be explicated and tested by combining data from voter surveys, laboratory experiments, and analyses of party strategies. The goal is to make an important contribution to the understanding of how electoral democracies actually function and of why they perform better under some contexts than in others.

The True European Voter

Member of the Management Committee. (Project homepage)

This European research network aims at increasing the material preconditions and the scholarly competence for analyzing variations in the effectiveness of electoral democracy in Europe across countries and over time. The research network will develop a common dataset of national election studies and will organise both an annual training school for young scholars and international conferences. The network is financed in the framework of the COST programme of the European Union. The Swiss participation is financed by the State Secretariat for Education and Research.