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Prof. Dr. Stefanie Bailer

Department of Social Sciences
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Projects & Collaborations

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When and why do citizens distrust politicians? The role of the representative function

Research Project  | 4 Project Members

Die neuere Forschung wie auch die öffentliche Debatte gehen davon aus, dass die Politik einer Vertrauenskrise ausgesetzt ist. Diese Krise betrifft nicht nur die institutionelle, sondern auch die individuelle Ebene von Politik. Dies muss als Herausforderungen für die Demokratie begriffen werden, da die personelle Ebene der Politik ein wichtiges Scharnier in der Politikvermittlung darstellt. Das Projekt geht daher der Frage nach, wann und warum Bürger*innen Vertrauen in individuelle Politiker*innen entwickeln. Hierbei betonen wir die Rolle der politischen Repräsentation als eine der massgeblichen Determinanten für politisches Vertrauen. Erstens untersuchen wir das Gefühl der Bürger*innen, in der Politik repräsentiert zu werden, und analysieren, wie sich dies auf das politische Vertrauen auswirkt. Zweitens und drittens sehen wir die deskriptive und substantielle Repräsentation als wichtige Einflussgrößen für die Einstellungen der Bürger*innen zur Politik. Vertrauen entsteht aus dieser Sicht dann, wenn Bürger*innen durch Mitglieder der gleichen sozialen Gruppe im Parlament vertreten werden oder durch Abgeordnete, die sichtbar deren Interessen im politischen Prozess vertreten. Viertens erforschen wir das Zusammenspiel zwischen deskriptiver und substantieller Repräsentation und deren Auswirkung auf das politische Vertrauen. Hierbei wird erwartet, dass deskriptive Repräsentant*innen, die sich für die Belange ihrer sozialen Gruppe einsetzen, die höchsten Werte an politischem Vertrauen erzeugen. Zur Untersuchung dieser Fragen wenden wir einen Large-N-Umfrage-basierten Ansatz an und führen Survey-Experimente mit Bürger*innen durch, die der Frage nachgehen, wie ihr politisches Vertrauen auf unterschiedliche Konfigurationen von deskriptiver und inhaltlicher Repräsentation reagiert.

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Video for Scientific Outreach of the Research Network Responsible Digital Society

Research Networks of the University of Basel  | 8 Project Members

The research network "Responsible Digital Society" is involved in a variety of ways to strengthen the promotion of interdisciplinary exchange and cooperative research in the field of digital transformation.

In the area of research, the network creates forums for regular scientific exchange and supports the coordination of interdisciplinary research proposals. In the area of promoting young researchers, the network organizes summer and winter schools for them. In the area of networking, the network promotes regular exchanges with industrial partners in the region. In the area of outreach, the network strengthens the public dialogue by organizing colloquia and panel discussions on digitization with guests from various disciplines.

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Visual Politician

Research Project  | 4 Project Members

VIP - the VIsual Politician Citizens and especially the younger generations increasingly turn towards digital forms of information when they update themselves about political matters: Not only do established media invest in their online presence, social media platforms also allow politicians to distribute information more directly and without an intermediary (eg. Kruikemeier, Van Noort et al. 2013, Rauchfleisch and Metag 2015). We aim to shed new light in this field of representative- voter communication by analyzing how politicians use visuals in their online communication with voters and how they react to it. In particular, the use of images (visuals) has mostly been neglected or investigated on a small scale (see e.g.Kruikemeier, Gattermann et al. 2018) since it is technically demanding. However, visual - photos and videos - of politicians in social media are of particular interest since visuals have the potential to have a different effect than verbal communication. Visuals show a more human image of politicians (Loader, Vromen et al. 2016) and have the potential to transmit personalized information better than ideas (Zamora 2010) and have a stronger emotional effect (Samuel-Azran, Yarchi et al. 2018). Online news consumption has been linked to the filter bubble and echo chamber by various authors (Conover, Ratkiewicz et al. 2011, Bessi, Coletto et al. 2015, DiFranzo and Gloria-Garcia 2017). Both terms capture the notion that users on social media have a tendency to build homogeneous communities with polarized views of the world. Thus, we will track how visuals are shared, quoted, or re-used otherwise. This audience engagement plays a particularly central role in politicians - voter communication since it gives a measure how users react to the signals sent by politicians (Metz, Kruikemeier et al. 2019). This will be done based on existing applications (e.g. TwitterStand (Sankaranarayanan, Samet et al. 2009)) which need to be further developed to include visual information. In a last part of the project, we will focus on the perception of visual information by politicians and study experimentally how citizens react to it.

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New Relations Between Voters and Representatives in the Age of Social Media

Research Project  | 4 Project Members

This project aims to lay the groundwork for a deeper understanding of the relation between voters and elected representatives in the age of social media. Social media platforms like Twitter carry the potential to transform democracies as they allow for direct contact between politicians and voters and thus for more personalized contact between representatives and represented. Academic work on this topic, however, has so far remained highly descriptive and has focussed on the frequency or volume of social media usage by politicians and not so much on the content of their messages. As a result, we lack knowledge about the information politicians portray in social media activity, as well as what the effect of this communication is, e.g. how voters perceive it. The two studies presented in this proposal intend to target this important research gap and to analyse the micro-processes of the content of online communication and how voters perceive it. Study 1 ('What Do Politicians Tweet When? New Quantitative Insight Into the Strategic Use of Personality Traits and Policy Positions') is an observational study that investigates the tweets of a sample of Swiss and German politicians with the help of machine-learning to find out more about the motivations of politicians to tweet. We focus on Twitter as direct and individualized behaviour is best captured with this platform. Following key ideas in the representation and personalisation literature, we focus specifically on the distinction between personal or policy focussed content and investigate whether the content of the tweets depends on variables such as the incentive to cultivate a personal vote, professionalization of parties and parliament, or career stage in comparative perspective - information that is already available from the SNF project on "Parliamentary careers in comparison" . Study 2 ('What do voters want: Policy or Person') is a two country survey including an experiment that investigates how voters use social media for political purposes and which information they seek in these platforms. A short survey experiment focuses on how feelings of representation and voting intentions of voters are affected by the content of the twitter message that politicians share via social media and whether voters rather appreciate personal appeals about the politicians or information about policy positions and activities communicated via Twitter. Using an innovative survey design, we first extract the demographic personal profile and policy preferences of the participants. We then use this information to present subjects with candidate profiles and Tweets from politicians that are (dis)similar to them on these key dimensions. As such we contribute to the question whether voters appreciate politicians similar or dissimilar to their own personal profile (desire for descriptive representation) and feel better represented by politicians who are like them or who act on their behalf (desire for substantive representation). The conduct of these studies in Switzerland and Germany allows for a first insight on variation on relevant influencing variables such as the election system, the importance of parties and the professionalization of the parliamentary system. Importantly, this project forms the base for a larger research agenda that we aim to develop in the next years and where we want to further explore the potential of social media in fostering closer linkages between voters and politicians.

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Perceptions of Politics

Research Project  | 2 Project Members

The goal of the study is (1) to explore to what extent politicians have accurate perceptions regarding the preferences of the population they represent and (2) to explain why some politicians hold more precise perceptions than others. The project contends that in well-working democracies politicians need to be able to assess public wants accurately. The starting assumption is that that parliamentarians wish to represent citizens; but we know little about how politicians actually gauge public preferences. What information and sources do they use? How do they decide on their accuracy? Our research design matches a population survey with 150 interviews with parliamentarians from the Bundestag. In these interviews, we test if politicians match citizens' survey responses.

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Parliamentary Careers in Comparison

Research Project  | 6 Project Members

With the research project "Parliamentary Careers in Comparison" we propose to carry out an encompassing analysis of parliamentary candidates and parliamentarians and their activities in Switzerland and Germany as of 1949 until today. While parliamentary career research has often been rather descriptive, i.e. theoretically underspecified, confined to single countries, and/or non-dynamic, we aim to investigate biographical and behavioural data of parliamentary candidates and parliamentarians with partly novel tools (such as sequence analysis, see below) and over long periods of time in order to obtain a fuller and dynamic picture of parliamentary careers. Why is this of importance? Elections are the quintessential 'instrument of democracy' ( Powell 2000 ). Running as a candidate, being endorsed by a party and then elected by voters, and subsequently re-running, being re-nominated and re-elected - or not - constitutes the most basic mechanism that secures political responsiveness and accountability in a representative democracy ( Manin, Przeworski, & Stokes 1999 ); see Figure 1, below. Within the party group the control of party leaders over the nomination process is also the most powerful tool to secure party discipline - and therefore one of the most important elements in the emergence of responsible government ( Carey & Shugart 1995 ; Cox 1987 ). Yet, despite its centrality we still lack a systematic, individual-level and dynamic understanding of the process of democratic delegation - and we therefore also lack in-depth information on how political careers impact parliamentary behaviour. This is partly explained by the scarcity of available data - in particular on episodes anterior and posterior to a spell in parliament. The project at hand aims to collect and analyse these data for two exemplary and in many respect similar cases, Switzerland and Germany, over a long period of time. We plan to analyse this data with respect to career dynamics, representative roles, parliamentary behaviour, democratic accountability and conformity with the party line. A first set of questions revolves around pre-parliamentary episodes. What are the various pre-parliamentary career paths (defined by party membership and political offices at the local/regional/national level) in Switzerland and Germany, and have they changed over time? To what extent are they dependent on the local, regional and national party? How can different pre-parliamentary career patterns be explained - are they a function of the personal preferences and characteristics of parliamentarians (e.g. gender, ambition, profession) or are they a function of the parties and the party systems, e.g. the regional structure of parties, their size, their local autonomy? With a second set of questions we investigate how political institutions influence careers. What are the effects of electoral rules (district magnitude, effective and legal thresholds, proportional vs. majoritarian rules) on careers? How do daily allowances and parliamentary pension schemes affect careers, what role does the interconnectedness of jurisdictional levels in federalist systems play? Do different degrees of 'institutionalisation' between militia and full-time parliaments lead to different career paths? Regarding post-parliamentary careers in Germany and Switzerland we will investigate whether and which individual and institutional factors drive the decision to retire, to continue the career or to seek higher public office or private employment after having served in parliament. A third strand of research questions will focus on the consequences of the different career paths on parliamentary behaviour and future post-parliamentary careers, in particular with respect to voting, committee membership, higher offices etc. We analyse whether MPs with career paths closely linked to a party follow the party line more faithfully and whether the parliamentary behaviour is reflected in the subsequent nomination process: Are loyal and active MPs rewarded and passive or dissenting MPs sanctioned with good (bad) list positions or promising and hopeless districts, respectively? What role do committee membership and chance to obtain higher offices (committee chair, chamber presidency, party group leadership, etc.) play? Moreover, we aim to compare pre-parliamentary career paths and the choice of post-parliamentary positions and see under which circumstances parliamentary service is a stepping or stumbling stone in a career. The project aims to provide a comprehensive and dynamic picture of the causes, courses and consequences of parliamentary careers in Switzerland and Germany. These two countries provide useful cases for comparison since they are both federalist countries but offer variation in important factors such as degree of parliamentary professionalization, electoral rules, orand the differing power of national parties.