Uwe Serdült | University of Zurich, Switzerland (original) (raw)
Papers by Uwe Serdült
Applied Sciences, 2022
Online customer review classification and analysis have been recognized as an important problem i... more Online customer review classification and analysis have been recognized as an important problem in many domains, such as business intelligence, marketing, and e-governance. To solve this problem, a variety of machine learning methods was developed in the past decade. Existing methods, however, either rely on human labeling or have high computing cost, or both. This makes them a poor fit to deal with dynamic and ever-growing collections of short but semantically noisy texts of customer reviews. In the present study, the problem of multi-topic online review clustering is addressed by generating high quality bronze-standard labeled sets for training efficient classifier models. A novel unsupervised algorithm is developed to break reviews into sequential semantically homogeneous segments. Segment data is then used to fine-tune a Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model obtained for the reviews, and to classify them along categories detected through topic modeling. After testing the segme...
Assessing the influence that socio-economic characteristics have on the division between traditio... more Assessing the influence that socio-economic characteristics have on the division between traditional voters and those who choose to vote via the internet is crucial to political debate as well as for the future development of democracies. Does the introduction of internet voting technology simply widen the divide between voters and non-voters, further isolating the part of the electorate already underrepresented in the political process? We address these issues by reviewing the current state of research in 22 empirical studies relating internet voting to socio-economic variables. The results are not homogeneous but suggest that although socio-economic factors do play an important role in explaining the choice of voting channel, they are strongly moderated by the general use of and trust in the internet.
Right after the national referendum votes of 27th September and 26th November 2009 by Geneva regi... more Right after the national referendum votes of 27th September and 26th November 2009 by Geneva registered Swiss Abroad using the internet as their voting channel, our center conducted an online survey asking questions about usability and voting behavior. The surveys generated representative samples regarding gender, age and country of residence. The response rates were 55.4% for the first, and 47.9% for the second survey. More than 70% of the respondents reported the Geneva e-voting procedures to be very user friendly. The gender gap among e-voters was smaller than we expected. The age group with a clear preference for the electronic channel were the 30-39 year olds. On a left-right scale the political orientation of e-voters took the form of a normal distribution. Further online surveys with e-voters from other Swiss cantons should allow to corroborate or revise these first results.
In general, mechanisms of direct democracy in Japan are not well established. At the national lev... more In general, mechanisms of direct democracy in Japan are not well established. At the national level, the National Referendum Law for the Change of the Constitution only recently came into effect on 18 May 2010, three years after its enactment. Before then there were no procedures laid out for a referendum on a constitutional amendment. At the local level, there are more options for direct citizen participation, however the result of a vote is not legally binding. This working paper aims to describe the different mechanisms of direct democracy in Japan, at the national as well as local level, to present their legal basis and frequency of use and to discuss developments since the late 1990s primarily at the local level.
One of the major shortcomings for the use of Social Network Analysis (SNA) in comparative policy ... more One of the major shortcomings for the use of Social Network Analysis (SNA) in comparative policy research is the lack of practical but valid and reliable procedures to generate comparable network data. With the Actor-Process-Event Scheme (APES) we suggest such a tool that transforms information gained from qualitative cases studies on political processes into quantifiable data that can be analyzed with SNA methods. In this paper, we present the current version of the web-based APES software application, discuss its conceptualization and point out possible applications. In the reminder of the paper we discuss issues of validity and reliability that are crucial for an SNA application of APES generated data and provide a brief outlook on further APES related research.
Elections are not the only but arguably one of the most important pillars for the proper function... more Elections are not the only but arguably one of the most important pillars for the proper functioning of liberal democracies. Recent evidence across the globe shows that it is not straightforward to conduct them in a free and fair manner. One constant concern is the role of money in politics, more specifically, election campaign financing. Frequent scandals are proof of the difficulties encountered with current approaches to tackle the issue. Suggestions on how to overcome the problem exist but seem difficult to implement. With the help of blockchain technology we might be able to make a step forward. A separate crypto currency specifically designed to pay for costs of political campaigning and advertising could be introduced. Admittedly, at this stage, there are many open questions. However, under the assumption that blockchain technology is here to stay, it is an idea that deserves further exploration.
In most advanced democracies there is a host of ancillary participatory instruments that operate ... more In most advanced democracies there is a host of ancillary participatory instruments that operate "between elections". The aim of such participatory instruments is to allow citizens to put new issues on the policy agenda. The range of so-called "between election" participatory instruments that are the focus of this paper can be grouped around three basic categories, the petition, the agenda initiative and the citizens' initiative. This paper deals mostly with the extent to which new technologies are used to enhance the functioning of the endorsement mechanism, so called e-collecting. Our core argument is that harnessing the full potential of the "e" dimension, especially the e-collecting aspect, will be conditional on two factors: (1) the specificity of the participatory instrument and (2) the institutionalization of the instrument, namely whether it is an established instrument or whether it is a recently introduces democratic innovation.
2021 6th International Conference on Business and Industrial Research (ICBIR), 2021
Social media and online reviews have changed customer behavior when buying fashion products onlin... more Social media and online reviews have changed customer behavior when buying fashion products online. Online customer reviews also provide opportunities for businesses to deliver improved customer experiences. This study aims to develop fashion style models, based on online customer reviews from e-commerce systems to analyze customer preferences. Topic Modeling with Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) was performed on a large collection of online customer reviews in different categories to investigate customer preferences by building fashion style models in a semantic space. Online product review data from Amazon, one of the leading online shopping websites globally, and Rakuten, one of the representative online shopping websites in Japan, were used to reveal the hidden topics in the review texts. The obtained topic definitions were manually examined, and the results were used to build computational models reflecting semantic relationships. The obtained fashion style models can potentia...
2021 7th International Conference on Computing and Data Engineering, 2021
Government Information Quarterly, 2017
Financing Referendum Campaigns, 2010
Over the last few years, the use of nationwide referendums has become more frequent. This is true... more Over the last few years, the use of nationwide referendums has become more frequent. This is true not only for Europe but also for Latin America. Indeed, in the case of Europe we have noticed an increasing use of direct democracy mechanisms in Eastern Europe as well as a growing use of referendums on European integration. Regarding Latin America, we can observe an increase of national referendums since the 1990s. As a consequence, there is a growing need to ensure that referendums meet with minimum democratic requirements. In order to define such a referendum standard, the Council of Europe’s Venice Commission adopted the Code of Good Practice on Referendums in March 2007. This chapter gives an overview of the national regulations on referendum campaigns, with a focus on campaign financing and on media access, two aspects of important preliminary conditions for democratic referendums. Beginning with a presentation of the relevant regulation in Switzerland, which surprisingly does not include extensive regulation on referendum campaigns, the chapter then turns to regulation in the member states of the Council of Europe as well as in Latin American states with at least one referendum experience since 1995. Distinguishing both the form and content of regulation, the chapter discusses countries that are typical in terms of campaign financing and media access rules respectively.
Referendums Around the World, 2014
Direct democracy and federalism are the two most distinctive features of the Swiss political syst... more Direct democracy and federalism are the two most distinctive features of the Swiss political system. Even though the forces of modernity are pulling towards an increased integration and coordination between the state levels, and are finally leading to a centralization of competences, the administrative structure is still very much decentralized and the principle of subsidiarity held high. In the first half of the 19th century Switzerland was characterized by a high cultural, linguistic and religious diversity. The formation of the modern Swiss state was a rather turbulent one, including the occupation by French troops under Napoleon (1798) and a civil war between the predominantly liberal, Protestant cantons and the Catholic Sonderbund cantons1 campaigning for cantonal autonomy (1847). Switzerland is also a country that underwent a rather late but rapid industrialization process, which eventually culminated in the political crisis of the violent general strike of 1918. Due to the tensions between Switzerland’s rigid and highly fragmented territorial structure2 and the rapid evolution of governmental tasks, reform of the Swiss political system has been high on the political agenda ever since the late 1960s.
Financing Referendum Campaigns, 2010
Applied Sciences, 2022
Online customer review classification and analysis have been recognized as an important problem i... more Online customer review classification and analysis have been recognized as an important problem in many domains, such as business intelligence, marketing, and e-governance. To solve this problem, a variety of machine learning methods was developed in the past decade. Existing methods, however, either rely on human labeling or have high computing cost, or both. This makes them a poor fit to deal with dynamic and ever-growing collections of short but semantically noisy texts of customer reviews. In the present study, the problem of multi-topic online review clustering is addressed by generating high quality bronze-standard labeled sets for training efficient classifier models. A novel unsupervised algorithm is developed to break reviews into sequential semantically homogeneous segments. Segment data is then used to fine-tune a Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model obtained for the reviews, and to classify them along categories detected through topic modeling. After testing the segme...
Assessing the influence that socio-economic characteristics have on the division between traditio... more Assessing the influence that socio-economic characteristics have on the division between traditional voters and those who choose to vote via the internet is crucial to political debate as well as for the future development of democracies. Does the introduction of internet voting technology simply widen the divide between voters and non-voters, further isolating the part of the electorate already underrepresented in the political process? We address these issues by reviewing the current state of research in 22 empirical studies relating internet voting to socio-economic variables. The results are not homogeneous but suggest that although socio-economic factors do play an important role in explaining the choice of voting channel, they are strongly moderated by the general use of and trust in the internet.
Right after the national referendum votes of 27th September and 26th November 2009 by Geneva regi... more Right after the national referendum votes of 27th September and 26th November 2009 by Geneva registered Swiss Abroad using the internet as their voting channel, our center conducted an online survey asking questions about usability and voting behavior. The surveys generated representative samples regarding gender, age and country of residence. The response rates were 55.4% for the first, and 47.9% for the second survey. More than 70% of the respondents reported the Geneva e-voting procedures to be very user friendly. The gender gap among e-voters was smaller than we expected. The age group with a clear preference for the electronic channel were the 30-39 year olds. On a left-right scale the political orientation of e-voters took the form of a normal distribution. Further online surveys with e-voters from other Swiss cantons should allow to corroborate or revise these first results.
In general, mechanisms of direct democracy in Japan are not well established. At the national lev... more In general, mechanisms of direct democracy in Japan are not well established. At the national level, the National Referendum Law for the Change of the Constitution only recently came into effect on 18 May 2010, three years after its enactment. Before then there were no procedures laid out for a referendum on a constitutional amendment. At the local level, there are more options for direct citizen participation, however the result of a vote is not legally binding. This working paper aims to describe the different mechanisms of direct democracy in Japan, at the national as well as local level, to present their legal basis and frequency of use and to discuss developments since the late 1990s primarily at the local level.
One of the major shortcomings for the use of Social Network Analysis (SNA) in comparative policy ... more One of the major shortcomings for the use of Social Network Analysis (SNA) in comparative policy research is the lack of practical but valid and reliable procedures to generate comparable network data. With the Actor-Process-Event Scheme (APES) we suggest such a tool that transforms information gained from qualitative cases studies on political processes into quantifiable data that can be analyzed with SNA methods. In this paper, we present the current version of the web-based APES software application, discuss its conceptualization and point out possible applications. In the reminder of the paper we discuss issues of validity and reliability that are crucial for an SNA application of APES generated data and provide a brief outlook on further APES related research.
Elections are not the only but arguably one of the most important pillars for the proper function... more Elections are not the only but arguably one of the most important pillars for the proper functioning of liberal democracies. Recent evidence across the globe shows that it is not straightforward to conduct them in a free and fair manner. One constant concern is the role of money in politics, more specifically, election campaign financing. Frequent scandals are proof of the difficulties encountered with current approaches to tackle the issue. Suggestions on how to overcome the problem exist but seem difficult to implement. With the help of blockchain technology we might be able to make a step forward. A separate crypto currency specifically designed to pay for costs of political campaigning and advertising could be introduced. Admittedly, at this stage, there are many open questions. However, under the assumption that blockchain technology is here to stay, it is an idea that deserves further exploration.
In most advanced democracies there is a host of ancillary participatory instruments that operate ... more In most advanced democracies there is a host of ancillary participatory instruments that operate "between elections". The aim of such participatory instruments is to allow citizens to put new issues on the policy agenda. The range of so-called "between election" participatory instruments that are the focus of this paper can be grouped around three basic categories, the petition, the agenda initiative and the citizens' initiative. This paper deals mostly with the extent to which new technologies are used to enhance the functioning of the endorsement mechanism, so called e-collecting. Our core argument is that harnessing the full potential of the "e" dimension, especially the e-collecting aspect, will be conditional on two factors: (1) the specificity of the participatory instrument and (2) the institutionalization of the instrument, namely whether it is an established instrument or whether it is a recently introduces democratic innovation.
2021 6th International Conference on Business and Industrial Research (ICBIR), 2021
Social media and online reviews have changed customer behavior when buying fashion products onlin... more Social media and online reviews have changed customer behavior when buying fashion products online. Online customer reviews also provide opportunities for businesses to deliver improved customer experiences. This study aims to develop fashion style models, based on online customer reviews from e-commerce systems to analyze customer preferences. Topic Modeling with Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) was performed on a large collection of online customer reviews in different categories to investigate customer preferences by building fashion style models in a semantic space. Online product review data from Amazon, one of the leading online shopping websites globally, and Rakuten, one of the representative online shopping websites in Japan, were used to reveal the hidden topics in the review texts. The obtained topic definitions were manually examined, and the results were used to build computational models reflecting semantic relationships. The obtained fashion style models can potentia...
2021 7th International Conference on Computing and Data Engineering, 2021
Government Information Quarterly, 2017
Financing Referendum Campaigns, 2010
Over the last few years, the use of nationwide referendums has become more frequent. This is true... more Over the last few years, the use of nationwide referendums has become more frequent. This is true not only for Europe but also for Latin America. Indeed, in the case of Europe we have noticed an increasing use of direct democracy mechanisms in Eastern Europe as well as a growing use of referendums on European integration. Regarding Latin America, we can observe an increase of national referendums since the 1990s. As a consequence, there is a growing need to ensure that referendums meet with minimum democratic requirements. In order to define such a referendum standard, the Council of Europe’s Venice Commission adopted the Code of Good Practice on Referendums in March 2007. This chapter gives an overview of the national regulations on referendum campaigns, with a focus on campaign financing and on media access, two aspects of important preliminary conditions for democratic referendums. Beginning with a presentation of the relevant regulation in Switzerland, which surprisingly does not include extensive regulation on referendum campaigns, the chapter then turns to regulation in the member states of the Council of Europe as well as in Latin American states with at least one referendum experience since 1995. Distinguishing both the form and content of regulation, the chapter discusses countries that are typical in terms of campaign financing and media access rules respectively.
Referendums Around the World, 2014
Direct democracy and federalism are the two most distinctive features of the Swiss political syst... more Direct democracy and federalism are the two most distinctive features of the Swiss political system. Even though the forces of modernity are pulling towards an increased integration and coordination between the state levels, and are finally leading to a centralization of competences, the administrative structure is still very much decentralized and the principle of subsidiarity held high. In the first half of the 19th century Switzerland was characterized by a high cultural, linguistic and religious diversity. The formation of the modern Swiss state was a rather turbulent one, including the occupation by French troops under Napoleon (1798) and a civil war between the predominantly liberal, Protestant cantons and the Catholic Sonderbund cantons1 campaigning for cantonal autonomy (1847). Switzerland is also a country that underwent a rather late but rapid industrialization process, which eventually culminated in the political crisis of the violent general strike of 1918. Due to the tensions between Switzerland’s rigid and highly fragmented territorial structure2 and the rapid evolution of governmental tasks, reform of the Swiss political system has been high on the political agenda ever since the late 1960s.
Financing Referendum Campaigns, 2010
Entmystifizierung der durchschnittlichen Stimmbeteiligung anhand von Stimmregisterdaten aus der S... more Entmystifizierung der durchschnittlichen Stimmbeteiligung anhand von Stimmregisterdaten aus der Stadt St. Gallen