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"Bernhard, Laurent"
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Campaign strategy in direct democracy
\"This book takes a fresh look at direct democracy by exploring how political actors run direct-democratic campaigns. It is the first study of comparative direct-democratic campaigning and examines eight campaigns on four salient policy domains: immigration, health politics, welfare state issues, and economic liberalism centering on the world's champion par excellence of direct-democracy, Switzerland. Bernhard derives much of his analysis through interviews conducted with campaign managers providing first-hand accounts that offer unprecedented access into the organization and strategy behind direct-democratic campaigns. Campaign Strategy in Direct Democracy is essential reading for students and scholars of political communication and political science.\"--Publisher's website.
Book
Revisiting the Inclusion-Moderation Thesis on Radical Right Populism: Does Party Leadership Matter?
This article reflects on the inclusion-moderation thesis, which asserts that parties from the radical right become like mainstream parties once they move from the opposition to government. This mainstreaming primarily occurs through the moderation of issue positions and the decline of populism. In this article, I focus on populism and consider the role of party leadership for government parties. I distinguish between traditional and managerial leadership. While traditional leadership employs an adversarial strategy toward mainstream parties, managerial leadership adopts an accommodative strategy. This article looks at three phases: 1) the opposition period; 2) in office under traditional party leadership; 3) in office under managerial party leadership. I expect that, compared to the second phase when the party is in office under traditional party leadership, levels of populism are higher during the opposition period and lower when it is in office under managerial party leadership. The empirical part of this article conducts a quantitative content analysis on the populist communication of the Geneva Citizens’ Movement, a radical right party from Switzerland. The findings tend to support my theoretical argument.
Journal Article
Debating unemployment policy : political communication and the labour market in Western Europe
\"In 2008 the world experienced the Great Recession, a financial and economic crisis of enormous proportions and the greatest economic downturn since the 1930s. In its wake, unemployment became a key preoccupation of West European publics and politicians. This comparative study considers the policy debates surrounding unemployment in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Denmark and Switzerland since 2008. With an over-arching focus on drawing out cross-national commonalities and differences, the authors ask whether patterns of political communication vary across countries. Their analysis draws on interviews with labour market policy-makers in the six selected countries, and paints a revealing picture. Appealing to researchers in comparative politics, political communication and welfare state research, this book will also interest practitioners involved in labour market policy\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Closer or More Distant? The Congruence Between Elites and Voters on Swiss–EU Relations
Elite-citizen congruence is central to normative theories of representation. This article compares the preferences of Swiss elites and citizens about relations with the EU, examining whether patterns of elite-citizen divergence documented in EU member states extend to a non-member state with exceptionally high levels of economic integration. At a time when Switzerland and the EU are (re)negotiating their relations, this analysis is of great importance. Drawing on survey data from the 2023 Swiss Election Study (Selects) at both candidate and citizen levels, we test two hypotheses from the European integration literature. First, we expect political elites to favor closer relations with the EU more than voters. Second, we hypothesize that elites adopt more extreme positions than voters, with party elites from pro-European parties being more integrationist and those from Eurosceptic parties being more anti-integration than their respective electorates. Results support both hypotheses. Political elites are significantly more pro-EU than voters overall, while voters of the radical right Swiss People’s Party are less reluctant about closer Swiss–EU relations than party elites, and moderate party voters (social democrats, liberals, center, greens, and green liberals) favor closer ties less than their candidates. We argue that elite polarization represents the more fundamental driving factor, while the aggregate pro-EU elite bias reflects the specific balance of political forces in given contexts. This distinction has crucial implications: scholars should prioritize examining polarization dynamics across diverse settings rather than focusing exclusively on directional biases, thereby offering new analytical leverage for understanding democratic representation beyond formal EU membership.
Journal Article
The use of the abuse policy narrative in asylum debates and its effects on citizens’ opinion formation
Asylum seekers are often portrayed as “bogus refugees” who try to abuse a destination country’s generosity and protection. We scrutinise the use and effect of such a constructed abuse policy narrative in Swiss asylum referendums by examining the conveyance of this narrative by political elite actors (meso-level) and its effect on citizens’ opinion formation (micro-level). On the meso-level, our analysis shows that political organisations rely more strongly on the abuse policy narrative (1) if a referendum proposal contains more tightening as opposed to streamlining policies and (2) if their political ideology is to the right. While the first finding also applies at the micro-level, voters from both the right and the centre are likely to base their decision on the abuse policy narrative. The fact that this narrative is convincing for centrist voters is particularly important as they usually play a decisive role in the outcome of asylum referendums.
Journal Article
Intra-Camp Coalitions in Direct Democracy: Evidence from Referendums on Asylum
This article seeks to advance the underdeveloped literature on coalitions in direct democracy by considering intra-camp coalitions (ICC) at the level of political elites. The binary format of ballot measures leads to the formation of two opposing camps (i.e., supporters and opponents). However, political actors who belong to a given camp are not obliged to work with each other in the course of direct-democratic campaigns. I argue that the formation of ICC is ideologically driven, as political actors may be inclined to more closely cooperate with those actors who share their beliefs. Therefore, I expect that the actors of a given camp will create ideologically more homogeneous coalitions. The empirical analysis focuses on the salient issue of asylum by examining the cooperative ties between political organizations that participated in two Swiss referendum campaigns. Drawing on the CONCOR algorithm, I identify the actor compositions of the four camps in question. I show that the organizations that form the two main ICC on either side significantly differ from each other in terms of their positioning on the left-right scale. Hence, actors who campaign on the same side tend to separate into coalitions that are ideologically more homogeneous.
Journal Article
Do Intensive Public Debates on Direct-Democratic Ballots Narrow the Gender Gap in Social Media Use?
Despite the growing importance of new technologies, research on individual opinion formation in the digital domain is still in its infancy. This article empirically examines citizens’ use of social media in the context of direct democracy. Based on previous work, we expect men to form their opinions on social media more frequently than women (gender gap hypothesis). In the second step, we focus on the contextual level by examining the role campaigns play in reducing this discrepancy. More specifically, we hypothesize that the presumed gender gap narrows in accordance with the increasing intensity of public debates that precede ballots (interaction hypothesis). The empirical analysis draws on 13 post-ballot surveys held at Switzerland’s federal level from 2016 to 2020 and supports both the gender gap and the interaction hypotheses.
Journal Article
Anticipating Office: Does the Populist Radical Right Decrease Its Populist Communication When It Has the Opportunity to Join Government?
The ‘inclusion–moderation thesis’ suggests that populist parties will be tamed by government inclusion. However, empirical evidence is mixed. We argue that this may be explained by different strategic contexts. We hypothesize that populist parties that rely on coalition partners will reduce their populist communication when they have credible government prospects. We analyse multiple years of political communication by two radical-right populist parties, the Swiss People's Party (SVP) and the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ). Although the two parties are rather similar ideologically, this is a most different systems design (MDSD). While the SVP is a typical governing party that was only in opposition once (2007/2008), the FPÖ is typically in opposition, with recent government experience (2017–2019). This empirical analysis focuses on these crucial periods. We find evidence of moderation before joining government for both parties in our pooled analysis. However, individual analyses suggest that this was much clearer for the SVP.
Journal Article
Interlayer exciton mediated second harmonic generation in bilayer MoS2
Second-harmonic generation (SHG) is a non-linear optical process, where two photons coherently combine into one photon of twice their energy. Efficient SHG occurs for crystals with broken inversion symmetry, such as transition metal dichalcogenide monolayers. Here we show tuning of non-linear optical processes in an inversion symmetric crystal. This tunability is based on the unique properties of bilayer MoS
2
, that shows strong optical oscillator strength for the intra- but also interlayer exciton resonances. As we tune the SHG signal onto these resonances by varying the laser energy, the SHG amplitude is enhanced by several orders of magnitude. In the resonant case the bilayer SHG signal reaches amplitudes comparable to the off-resonant signal from a monolayer. In applied electric fields the interlayer exciton energies can be tuned due to their in-built electric dipole via the Stark effect. As a result the interlayer exciton degeneracy is lifted and the bilayer SHG response is further enhanced by an additional two orders of magnitude, well reproduced by our model calculations. Since interlayer exciton transitions are highly tunable also by choosing twist angle and material combination our results open up new approaches for designing the SHG response of layered materials.
Efficient second-harmonic generation (SHG) occurs for crystals with broken inversion symmetry, such as transition metal dichalcogenide monolayers. Here the authors show SHG tuning in bilayer MoS
2
- an inversion-symmetric crystal - mediated by interlayer excitons.
Journal Article
Spin/valley pumping of resident electrons in WSe2 and WS2 monolayers
Monolayers of transition metal dichalcogenides are ideal materials to control both spin and valley degrees of freedom either electrically or optically. Nevertheless, optical excitation mostly generates excitons species with inherently short lifetime and spin/valley relaxation time. Here we demonstrate a very efficient spin/valley optical pumping of resident electrons in n-doped WSe
2
and WS
2
monolayers. We observe that, using a continuous wave laser and appropriate doping and excitation densities, negative trion doublet lines exhibit circular polarization of opposite sign and the photoluminescence intensity of the triplet trion is more than four times larger with circular excitation than with linear excitation. We interpret our results as a consequence of a large dynamic polarization of resident electrons using circular light.
Optical excitation of transition metal dichalcogenide monolayers mostly generates excitons species with inherently short lifetime and spin/valley relaxation time. Here, the authors demonstrate efficient spin/valley optical pumping of resident electrons in n-doped WSe
2
and WS
2
monolayers.
Journal Article