Study on party websites: SP closest to users
The SP is winning the election campaign—at least the digital one. According to a study by the IFAA, the SP, closely followed by the SVP, is the party whose website best addresses the needs of the Swiss people.
The elections on October 23, 2011 are approaching, but how close are the Swiss parties' communications to the needs and interests of their voters? The Institute for Applied Argument Research (IFAA) in Bern, together with students from the University of Bern Media Studies (IKMB), took a scientific look at the websites of the Swiss political parties. All content on the party portals was compared with current search data from various search engines in order to measure the proximity of the online campaigns to the public.
As in 2007, it can generally be said that the left-wing and green parties communicate closer to the interests of the Swiss population than the bourgeois parties. The SP, closely followed by the SVP and the Greens, is obviously more in tune with the times with its official websites than its fellow campaigners in the bourgeois parties. The CVP, on the other hand, is doing particularly badly - it has lost a lot of ground compared to 2007 and is therefore at the bottom of the rankings.
The differences between the parties on the web are significant this year: they amount to between 67.4 percent (SD) and 45.7 percent (BDP) in terms of user proximity. The BDP therefore comes last in this ranking. Among the small parties, the Swiss Democrats win, followed by the Party of Labor and the CSP, with the Freedom Party coming last in the IFAA ranking.
Most parties obviously consider globalization to be the most important topic trend for winning the election campaign, with four of the five party portals surveyed even ranking it among the top ten topics. Another important topic for winning votes is the energy debate. In 2007, this was still primarily a climate debate, but in the current election campaign it is no longer just the SP and the Greens who are hoping to win the favor of voters with this topic, but the conservative parties have also discovered the energy issue. Other important issues for almost all parties are peace policy, migration and financial policy.
However, according to political scientist and online researcher Christoph Glauser, if you compare the most important topics of the parties with the search queries of potential voters on search engines in order to get a picture of the mood of the population, the priorities are quite different: "The Swiss often search for banks, agriculture, finance, Europe, taxes and work with the help of search engines. When it comes to energy topics, the content offered and the content searched for are on a par." Health policy topics or help topics on personal issues are always very popular. Since the 2003 election campaign, topics relating to the drug problem or Iraq have completely disappeared.
