Chair of Comparative Politics
The comparative politics chair at the Institute was created in 2002, with the nomination of Prof. Hanspeter Kriesi. The research projects conducted by Hanspeter Kriesi and his team deal with the comparative analysis of cleavages and conflict dimensions, political mobilization and political communication in the context of elections, referenda and non-conventional campaigns in Western Europe and Switzerland. The current focus is on the one hand on the transformation of conflict lines in national and European election campaigns and policy-specific debates (in a joint project with the University of Munich), and on the other hand on the analysis of actor strategies in direct democratic referendum campaigns in Switzerland (in the context of the NCCR Democracy. Further projects analyze value change in Switzerland, the Swiss elections in 2007, electoral campaigns in selected countries, and naturalization procedures in Swiss communes.