Measuring Political Performance
| Project Title: Measuring Political Performance | |
| Funded by: Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF, 10003190) | |
| Duration: October 2025 - September 2028 | |
| Principal Investigators: Dr. Laurence Brandenberger (IPZ, University of Zurich), Dr. Luis Salamanca (SDSC, ETH Zurich) | |
| Amount: 803825 CHF | |
| Focus: Clear indicators of political success, election promise fulfillment, and political legacy of members of the Swiss parliament | |
| Data: DemocraSci Knowledge Graph | |
| Methods: Knowledge Graph, Text Embeddings, Supervised Machine Learning, NLP | |
| Open Access: Performance scores, datasets, and tools will be made publicly available | |
| Tagline: "Making Political Performance Visible: Empowering Democracy through Data" | |
| Acronym: |
About the Project
How can citizens judge if their elected representatives truly deliver on their promises? Modern democracies rely on informed voters — yet tracking political work is daunting. Our project, Measuring Political Performance, addresses this gap.
We develop clear, politically neutral indicators to assess:
- Political Success: How effective are MPs in advancing their careers, reputations, and policy goals?
- Promise Fulfillment: Do MPs keep their electoral promises once in office?
- Political Legacy: Do their actions create lasting, meaningful change?
Built on the DemocraSci knowledge graph and state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) methods, the project offers new ways for citizens, journalists, and researchers to understand political performance at the individual and group level.
Our goal: to make Swiss parliamentary work transparent, comparable, and accessible — strengthening democratic accountability.
Learn More
We will:
- Publish interactive success profiles for Swiss MPs (career, reputation, policy success)
- Release an open-access database linking electoral promises to legislative actions
- Analyze political legacies through tree-like networks of lawmaking
Share tools and methods with researchers to extend to other parliaments.
Our work will culminate in a public-facing platform integrated into DemocraSci, making it easy to explore, compare, and understand political performance.