Voting in the Echo Chamber? Patterns of Political Online Activities and Voting Behavior in Switzerland

Understanding the political consequences of digitalization is among the key challenges for modern societies. A pressing issue is the question whether political online activities make individuals more close-minded and less willing to consider alternative arguments. We examine this question using a peculiarity of the Swiss electoral system – the possibility to split votes – as a behavioral outcome measure. We argue that political online activities might either make individuals less likely to split votes (“echo chamber”-argument) or more likely to spread their votes across parties (“deliberation”-argument). Empirically, we use data from the Swiss Election Study Selects 2019 to test these arguments. The results of a hierarchical logistic regression analysis do not support any of the conflicting arguments. Yet, additional analyses suggest that political interest moderates the relationship between online activities and vote splitting: political interest makes online activists more likely to split votes

Voting in the Echo Chamber?

Supplementary Material to the article "Voting in the Echo Chamber? Patterns of Political Online Activities and Voting Behavior in Switzerland" forthcoming in Swiss Political Science Revie

Wahlentscheidung in der Echo-Kammer? Digitales politisches Engagement und Panaschieren bei der Schweizer Nationalratswahl 2019

Digitalisierung verändert Kommunikationsstrukturen, politische Teilhabe und politische Prozesse. Wie sich diese Transformationen auf politisches Verhalten auswirken, ist an vielen Stellen nach wie vor unklar. Eine neue Studie zeigt anhand von Umfragedaten der Schweizer Wahlstudie Selects 2019, dass kein allgemeiner Zusammenhang zwischen digitalem politischem Engagement und Stimmensplitting besteht. Der Zusammenhang hängt indes davon ab, wie stark eine Person allgemein politisch interessiert ist

DataSheet_1_Optimizing the structure of interdisciplinary tumor boards for effective cancer care.pdf

IntroductionMulti-professional interdisciplinary tumor boards (ITB) are essential institutions to discuss all newly diagnosed, relapsed or complex cancer patients in a team of specialists to find an optimal cancer care plan for each individual patient with regard to national and international clinical practice guidelines, patient´s preference and comorbidities. In a high-volume cancer center, entity-specific ITBs take place at least once a week discussing a large number of patients. To a high level of expertise and dedication, this also requires an enormous amount of time for physicians, cancer specialists and administrative support colleagues, especially for radiologists, pathologists, medical oncologists and radiation oncologists, who must attend all cancer-specific boards according to certification requirements.MethodsIn this 15-month prospective German single-center analysis, we examined the established structures of 12 different cancer-specific ITBs at the certified Oncology Center and demonstrate tools helping to optimize processes before, during and after the boards for optimal, time-saving procedures.ResultsBy changing pathways, introducing revised registration protocols and new digital supports we could show that the workload of preparation by radiologists and pathologists could be reduced significantly by 22.9% (p=DiscussionThere are several ways to reduce the workload of all ITB team members while maintaining high quality recommendations and adherence to national and international guidelines.</p