177 Years of Direct Democracy: A Quantitative Analysis of Swiss Federal Votes

Overview

This repository contains the source code, data analysis, and visualization scripts for a Quarto book project exploring the history and patterns of Swiss Direct Democracy.

Unlike standard representative democracies, Switzerland allows citizens to vote directly on federal laws and constitutional amendments up to four times a year. Utilizing the Swissvotes dataset, this project analyzes over 650 federal votes since the founding of the modern state in 1848 to answer fundamental questions about power and participation:

• The Cost of Entry: How difficult is it to actually get an issue on the ballot?

• The Influence of Power: Can campaign money buy a result? Or does the media hold the real sway?

• The Cultural Divide: Does the "Röstigraben" (the border between Switzerland's language groups) really split the country?

• The Final Verdict: In a system designed for compromise, how often does the Parliament actually get its way?

Academic Context

This work was produced as the Final Project for the Fall 2025 graduate course:

• Course: GR5702 Exploratory Data Analysis & Visualization
• Institution: Columbia University
• Instructor: Joyce Robbins

Performance: Achieved a perfect score of 60/60, marking the highest grade in the cohort.

Instructor Feedback: "Excellent project. The graphs are very thoughtful and polished. The narrative is compelling and firmly rooted in the political / historical context. Well done!"

Tech Stack

This project is built using the R ecosystem and Quarto for publishing.

• Language: R
• Framework: Quarto (HTML Book format)
• Hosting: GitHub Pages

Repository Structure

├── docs/                   # Rendered HTML files (Published to GitHub Pages)
├── scripts/                # R scripts for data cleaning and scraping
├── swiss-votes-favicon.png # Project icon
├── swiss-votes-logo.png    # Project logo
├── index.qmd               # Introduction & project scope
├── data.qmd                # Data sourcing, description, and cleaning
├── results.qmd             # Main analysis and visualizations
├── conclusion.qmd          # Summary of findings
└── _quarto.yml             # Quarto configuration

Local Setup

To run this project locally on your machine:

1. Clone the repository:

   git clone https://github.com/alex-is-busy-coding/swiss-votes-viz.git
   cd swiss-votes-viz

2. Open in RStudio: Open the quarto-edav-template.Rproj file.

3. Render the Book: You can render the entire project via the terminal or R console:

   quarto render

Author

The code and quantitative analysis for this project were developed by Alexander Vassilev.