Pre-Election Positions and Voting Behaviour in Parliament: Consistency among Swiss MPs

This article examines the determinants of positional incongruence between pre-election statements and post-election behaviour in the Swiss parliament between 2003 and 2009. The question is examined at the individual MP level, which is appropriate for dispersion-of-powers systems like Switzerland. While the overall rate of political congruence reaches about 85%, a multilevel logit analysis detects the underlying factors which push or curb a candidate's propensity to change his or her mind once elected. The results show that positional changes are more likely when (1) MPs are freshmen, (2) individual voting behaviour is invisible to the public, (3) the electoral district magnitude is not small, (4) the vote is not about a party's core issue, (5) the MP belongs to a party which is located in the political centre, and (6) if the pre-election statement dissents from the majority position of the legislative party group. Of these factors, the last one is paramount.

Understanding Political Knowledge and Its Influence on Voting Preferences in the 2007 Federal Election

In this article we propose a model to explain how voters' perceptions of their ideological proximity to a party affect their propensity to vote for that party. We argue that political knowledge plays a crucial moderating role in the relationship between party proximity and voting propensity. It is necessary, however, to distinguish between institutional knowledge (information about the political system) and party knowledge (information about the parties' left-right positions). An analysis of survey data from the 2007 Swiss federal elections supports our main hypothesis that party knowledge enhances the link between party proximity and voting propensity. Institutional knowledge may have additional influence, but clear evidence for this effect was obtained only for propensities to vote for the Swiss People's Party (SVP). Overall, the impact of political knowledge was found to be substantial, even after controlling for the outstanding influence of party identification and other predictors of voting propensities

E-tools for civic education : experiences from the election campaign in Switzerland 2007

Political participation is often very low in Switzerland especially among students and young citizens. In the run-up to the Swiss parliamentary election in October 2007 several online tools and campaigns were developed with the aim to increase not only the level of information about the political programs of parties and candidates, but also the electoral participation of younger citizens. From a practical point of view this paper will describe the development, marketing efforts and the distribution as well as the use of two of these tools : the so-called "Parteienkompass" (party compass) and the "myVote"-tool - an online voting assistance tool based on an issue-matching system comparing policy preferences between voters and candidates on an individual level. We also havea look at similar tools stemming from Voting Advice Applications (VAA) in other countries in Western Europe. The paper closes with the results of an evaluation and an outlook to further developments and on-going projects in the near future in Switzerland.

The Half-Life of Election Pledges : What makes MPs change their positions?

"Thou shalt not bear false witness," as we all know. Yet changing one's mind in case of respectable reasons seems to be allowed. Which is good news for politicians, but reduces the effectiveness of prospective voting, i.e. the focus on "the commitments of candidates to take actions that citizens desire to be taken" (Powell 2000: 9). This may be bad news for voters. By comparing pre-election commitments of Swiss members of parliament (MPs) with actual voting behaviour in the lower house of parliament, the following article explores the question how much confidence voters can have in prospective voting and what factors explain (non-)fulfilment of election pledges.

Undercoverage and Nonresponse in a List-sampled Telephone Election Survey

For landline telephone surveys in particular, undercoverage has been a growing problem. However, research regarding the relative contributions of socio-demographic bias and other composition effects is scarce. We propose to address this issue by analyzing an election survey which used a sample from a register-based sampling frame containing basic socio-demographic information and to which telephone numbers were subsequently matched. With respect to socio-demographic representation of the final sample, we find that difficult to match groups are also difficult to contact, while those who cooperate tend to have different characteristics. We find bias due to undercoverage to be of greater magnitude than noncontact bias, while noncooperation falls between the two. As for substantive variables, both additional efforts to match missing telephone numbers and the construction of better weights are successful in closing the gap between survey estimates of voting behavior and true values from the election results.

Temporalités des commémorations du Centenaire sur Twitter

Du 1er avril 2014 au 1er avril 2015, plus d'un million de tweets ont été émis sur les commémorations du centenaire de la Première Guerre mondiale. Ces tweets, qui ont été collectés par l'auteur de cette proposition sur la base de hashtags liés au centenaire, contiennent de nombreuses traces de temporalités : le flux (twitter), le tweet (date de publication), mais aussi les nombreuses références aux temporalités propres aux utilisateurs de twitter, au Centenaire et à la Première Guerre mondiale. L'historien ne peut alors que se poser la question suivante : de quelle manière ces temporalités sont-elles reliées entre elles ? Comment s'imbriquent ces différentes strates de temps ?

Échos du centenaire sur le web et sur Twitter : partage de liens et Grande Guerre

Depuis avril 2014, plus de deux millions de tweets ont été publiés, touchant aux commémorations du Centenaire de la Grande Guerre, principalement en Anglais et en Français. Cette communication s'intéresse à une pratique précise lié aux modalités d'usage de Twitter: le partage de liens. En s'intéressant notamment aux liens pointant vers des pages web francophones partagés le 11 novembre 2015, l'auteur a constitué un corpus d'environ 1000 pages web et en analyse le contenu. Il s'interroge notamment sur l'émergence en tant que lieu de mémoire du site « Mémoire des Hommes » et plus particulièrement de la base de données des morts pour la France.

A Social Network Analysis of Twitter: Mapping the Digital Humanities Community

Defining digital humanities might be an endless debate if we stick to the discussion about the boundaries of this concept as an academic "discipline". In an attempt to concretely identify this field and its actors, this paper shows that it is possible to analyse them through Twitter, a social media widely used by this "community of practice". Based on a network analysis of 2,500 users identified as members of this movement, the visualisation of the "who's following who?" graph allows us to highlight the structure of the network's relationships, and identify users whose position is particular. Specifically, we show that linguistic groups are key factors to explain clustering within a network whose characteristics look similar to a small world.

Does VAA popularity pay off ? : Smartvote users preferred candidates and their results in the 2007 Swiss federal elections

Voting is fundamental for democracy, however, this decisive democratic act requires quite an effort. Decision making at elections depends largely on the interest to gather information about candidates and parties, the effort to process the information at hand and the motivation to reach a vote choice. Especially in electoral systems with highly fragmented party systems and hundreds of candidates running for office, the process of decision making in the pre‐election sphere is highly demanding. In the age of information and communication technologies, new possibilities for gathering and processing such information are available. Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) provide guidance to voters prior to the act of voting and assist voters in choosing between different candidates and parties on the basis of issue congruence. Meanwhile widely used all over the world, scientific inquiry into the effect of such tools on electoral behavior is ongoing. This paper adds to the current debate by focusing on whether the popularity of candidates on the Swiss VAA smartvote eventually paid off at the 2007 Swiss federal elections and whether there is a direct link between the performance of a candidate on the tool and his or her electoral performance.

The Strength of Promissory Representation : What Makes MPs Change their Positions ?

The paper analyses the positional congruence between pre-election statements in the Swiss voting assistance application "smartvote" and post-election behaviour in the Swiss lower house between 2003 and 2009. For this purpose, we selected 34 smartvote questions which subsequently came up in parliament. Unlike previous studies which assessed the program-to-policy linkage of governments or party groups the paper examines the question at the level of individual MPs which seems appropriate for political systems which follow the idea of power dispersion. While the average rate of political congruence is at some 85 percent, a multivariate analysis detects the underlying factors which push or curb a candidate's propensity to change his or her mind once elections are over. The results show that positional changes are more likely if (1) MPs are freshmen, (2) individual voting behaviour is invisible to the public, (3) the vote is not about a party's core issue, (4) the MP belongs to a party which is located in the political centre, and (5) if the pre-election statement is in disagreement with the majority position of the legislative party group. The last-mentioned factor is paramount: the farer away a candidate's pre-election profile from his or her party is located, the weaker turns out to be the electoral link of promissory representation.

Swiss Democracy on the Web 2010 : Society and Politics in a Connected Age

The rapid adoption of online media like Facebook, Twitter or Wikileaks leaves us with little time to think. Where is information technology taking us, our society and our democratic institutions ? Is the Web replicating social divides that already exist offline or does collaborative technology pave the way for a more equal society ? How do we find the right balance between openness and privacy ? Can social media improve civic participation or do they breed superficial exchange and the promotion of false information ? These and lots of other questions arise when one starts to look at the Internet, society and politics. The first part of this paper gives an overview of the social changes that occur with the rise of the Web. The second part serves as an overview on how the Web is being used for political participation in Switzerland and abroad. Le développement rapide de nouveaux médias comme Facebook, Twitter ou Wikileaks ne laisse que peu de temps à la réflexion. Quels sont les changements que ces technologies de l'information impliquent pour nous, notre société et nos institutions démocratiques ? Internet ne fait-il que reproduire des divisions sociales qui lui préexistent ou constitue-t-il un moyen de lisser et d'égaliser ces mêmes divisions ? Comment trouver le bon équilibre entre transparence et respect de la vie privée ? Les médias sociaux permettent-ils de stimuler la participation politique ou ne sont-ils que le vecteur d'échanges superficiels et de fausses informations ? Ces questions, parmi d'autres, émergent rapidement lorsque l'on s'intéresse à la question des liens entre Internet, la société et la politique. La première partie de ce cahier est consacrée aux changements sociaux générés par l'émergence et le développement d'Internet. La seconde fait l'état des lieux de la manière dont Internet est utilisé pour stimuler la participation politique en Suisse et à l'étranger.