Democracy Lab Basel
With ten concrete reform approaches addressing specific challenges, the project "Democracy Lab Basel" (Verein Demokratie Labor/BFH) aims to contribute to the modernization of Switzerland's democratic structures and processes.
Factsheet
- Schools involved Business School
- Institute(s) Institute for Public Sector Transformation
- Research unit(s) Digital Democracy
- Funding organisation Others
- Duration (planned) 01.01.2022 - 31.12.2024
- Head of project Dr. Daniel Schwarz Badertscher
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Project staff
Jan Fivaz
Dr. Annique Lombard - Partner Verein Demokratie Labor
- Keywords Digital Democracy, Experimental Studies, Partizipation, Opinion making, Evaluation
Situation
Digitalisation, climate change, increasing nationalist tendencies and the associated political polarization of society are exerting growing pressure on modern democracies to solve problems and reform. However, Swiss democracy has hardly changed institutionally in the last 100 years. Accordingly, there is a great need to adapt the instruments of participation and involvement. The project aims to develop and test reform approaches for more citizen participation.
Course of action
Based on the existing political structures, BFH will identify new approaches to democratic participation, opinion-forming and co-determination over a period of three years, test them experimentally for their practical suitability and translate them into concrete implementation proposals. In individual projects, technical solutions are already being outlined or prototypes of the corresponding instruments are being developed. In total, the project includes ten reform approaches.
