Suchergebnisse

The main goal of the project was to investigate change and persistence in the ideological structure of Switzerland, to trace back to its social and cultural causes and to interpret them from a contemporary diagnostic perspective. A multidimensional and relational view of social topologies based on Bourdieu was chosen as the theoretical approach to social differentiation. The sociographic approach was combined with theories of modernisation and value change for the dynamic consideration of change and the persistence of political and moral milieus.
As an ideal prerequisite for the reconstruction of worldviews, Switzerland has a unique resource in the form of results from federal referenda in the municipalities. The long time series of these aggregates of expressions of opinion goes back to the 19th century and offers a powerful "monitoring" of Switzerland's regional ideological differentiation and was therefore developed and used as an empirical basis.
The combination of social structure analysis, modernisation theory, coordination research and regional analysis required a transdisciplinary approach in which theoretical and methodological knowledge from sociology, political science and geography was incorporated and applied fruitfully. Qualitative and quantitative methods were used for the longitudinal analysis of the referendum results.
In the first phase, the required voting results were digitised, qualified in terms of content and subject matter, classified and integrated into a database. In the second phase, cross- section and longitudinal analyses were combined to extract ideological dimensions of conflict, named and interpreted with the help of content classification and finally modeled into a ideological topology. A reinterpretation of methods of Geographical Information Science (GIS) served both to visualize the ideological grid and to link it with conventional maps. By integrating indicator variables for social and cultural differentiation, a relationship to Bourdieu's social topology was created. In the third phase, four complex hypotheses were worked on, which make change and persistence in ideological topology explainable over the entire 130-year period. The SOTOMO project aimed to combine different theoretical traditions and methodological approaches and to develop new research strategies.