Democratic Processes and Political Behaviour

Project Leader

Prof. Dr. Hanspeter Kriese
hanspeter.kriesi@pwi.unizh.ch
Institut für Politikwissenschaft
University of Zurich
Seilergraben 53
8001 Zurich

Project Coordinator

Project Partners

Summary

The learning environment combines theory, methodology and empirical research techniques in politcal sciences. The theoretical knowledge about politcal institutions, processes, and actors in modern democracies are explained on real-world cases from Switzerland. Special attention is given to individual learning facilities and exercises with the use of different actual data-sets about popular referenda, elections, votations in parliament and other forms of political behaviour. The the goal is a integral understanding of democratic processes and the methodology to measure them. The project is affiliated to the NCCR „Challenges for Democracy in the 21th Century“ at University of Zurich, and embedded in the transfer-module of the NCCR. The interdisciplinary project-team is composed with political scientists, sociologists and geographers from the universities of Geneva, Lausanne, Berne and Zurich.