Discuss Data

Political science has always been interested in elections. Election campaigns, however, were ignored for a long time. Recently, however, a lot has changed both in science and in practice. The electorate is becoming more volatile even in Switzerland, and traditional forecasting models are failing. At the same time, the media landscape has changed and diversified massively. This is probably one of the reasons why there is now a group of researchers who have taken on the topics mexico rcs data of election campaigns and political marketing. These researchers now have their own journals and courses. And in Switzerland, the CAS Political Communication has been established at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences, where two dozen people from politics, administration and journalism receive further training every year.

The unqualified bashing of political scientists – carried out primarily in anonymous comment columns on online news portals – is nothing new. But the fact is that monopolies, explanatory powers and rusty structures are increasingly being challenged in our field too. The positive result of this is that there is now more exchange between people who research elections and election campaigns and those who hold elected office or earn their living from it. New portals such as DeFacto.expert, restmandat.ch, smartvote.ch or polithink.ch are great. The findings of political science are translated into a language that practitioners and interested citizens understand. Of course, you can always have a different opinion and occasionally be wrong. Nevertheless, the political discourse is reflected and enriched with a scientific background.