Applicants
Georg Lutz and André Mach
Collaborator
Riccardo Primavesi (SNF Doctoral Student)
Funded by
SNF, see Project Page
Duration
2015-2018
This project studies the impact of networks and campaigning of candidates running for national elections in Switzerland in the 2015 elections on their electoral success.This project will contribute to understanding better how candidates compete in elections and what matters for them to get preference votes and to get elected. Candidates play a crucial role in many electoral democracies, because they are the direct link between voters and decision-making processes within parties, in parliaments and governments. Therefore, to understand more about how candidates compete and what matters for their success is essential to understand the process of representation. We will look at the role of candidates in Switzerland. Switzerland is very favourable to study such effects because of the open ballot PR system where candidate preference votes cast by voters are the only factor that influences the rank order of candidates within a party list. Therefore candidate campaigns and candidate characteristics matter a lot on who finally represents the parties in parliament. The focus of the project is on two main factors that influence the number of preference votes a candidate gets.
First, we analyse the actual campaigns of a candidate, the resources involved and the different instruments a candidate uses in an election and explore how effective those instruments are. Second, we look at the candidates’ links to interest groups. Many candidates mention their membership in different organisations and in-terest groups in their campaigns and interest groups endorse candidates and recommend their members and supporters to vote for specific candidates. In addition, we will control for many other factors that may influence electoral success such as incumbency, gender, political experience, physical appearance or ballot position. We will be using data from the Swiss comparative candidate survey (CCS) that will be conducted in the framework of the Swiss election study Selects after the 2015 national elections. This comprehensive survey questionnaire, which will be sent to all candidates for both chambers of parliament (National Council and Council of States), includes questions on the candidates political background, on their campaign as well as on political preferences and attitudes towards democracy. In addition to the standard questionnaire, we will ask candidates to specify in detail their relationship to different interest groups and whether those interest groups have endorsed them. The self-reported information from the survey will be complemented with an analysis of the party leaflets that are distributed in each canton to all voters and where all candidates present themselves.
We will also analyse in more details the campaign activities of a selection of interest groups for specific candidates.This project is innovative in several ways. First it puts candidates and not parties in the centre of attention for how citizens and the state are linked and on how the process of representation functions. Second, we explore the impact of campaign resources and instruments on electoral success in a country where transparency over political finances is very limited. Third, this will be the first systematic study in Switzerland on the link between interest groups and candidates in the election phase and allows shedding lights on the mutual dependencies between candidates, parties and interest groups.
