We study socio-political systems in representative democracies. Motivated by problems that affect the proper functioning of the system, we build computational methods to answer research questions regarding the phenomena occurring in them. For each phenomen ...
Based on a field survey on the conflicts regarding the extension of the Ecole Hôtelière de Lausanne, this text discusses the production of public space. These controversies make possible an understanding of the production process of peri-urban space in ter ...
While technology is often claimed to be “democratizing”, the technologizing of society has more often yielded undemocratic or even anti-democratic outcomes. Is technology fundamentally at odds with democracy, or is it merely a rich and infinitely-adaptable ...
This thesis is composed of two essays that study the effectiveness of shareholder democracy.In the first essay, I analyze the firm value implications of shareholder-initiated proposals. I show that managerial resistance precludes half of shareholder-init ...
Within the framework of a simple model for social influence, the Taylor model, we analytically investigate the role of stubborn agents in the overall opinion dynamics of networked systems. Similar to zealots, stubborn agents are biased towards a certain op ...
Entrepreneurship is a highly contextualized process. Yet, the vast majority of entrepreneurship research has focused on Western contexts, yielding a skewed picture of global entrepreneurial behavior. Moreover, theories of mainstream psychology explaining t ...
A New Look at Civic Design reflects on the nature of the various crises facing the very idea of democracy today, explicitly in relation to climate change - namely mass extinctions, water scarcity and overabundance, and in general widespread and increasing ...
My dissertation, ‘Periodicity and Rural Urban Dynamics’, hypothesizes that the simultaneous experience of strongly contrasting sensations is pleasurable, and that ‘abrupt urbanism’ can enhance both rural and urban experience. This article investigates the ...
Switzerland has a long tradition of direct democracy, which makes it an ideal laboratory for research on real-world politics. Similar to recent open government initiatives launched worldwide, the Swiss government regularly releases datasets related to stat ...
Based on the 'universal' values of economic development, democratic governance and cultural diversity promoted by UNESCO, the official policy of the Federation of Malaysia, known as Wawasan 2020 (Vision 2020), promotes modernization with an emphasis on dem ...
