Prior to hosting a public lecture in UCD, Professor Daniel Kübler of the University of Zurich sat down with News Editors, Beth Clifford and John O’Connor to discuss research, politics and democracy.
The Centre for Democracy Research at UCD, in partnership with the Swiss Embassy, held a public lecture on 21 October, led by Professor Daniel Kübler, titled “Let the People Decide? Hope, Fear, and the Realities of Direct Democracy”. The lecture was held with the purpose of analysing and examining the Swiss approach to democracy through the country’s frequent use of referenda.
Dr. Daniel Kübler is a Professor for Democracy and Public Governance in the Department of Political Science at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. He is also Director at the Centre for Democracy Studies in Aarau. Professor Kübler’s research focuses on direct democracy, democratic innovations, public policy, and local and urban politics, at a time when the values of democracy are under threat.
In 2025, the world is becoming increasingly less democratic, with more autocracies outnumbering democracies for the first time in over two decades. Professor Kübler provided a candid statement, saying “who would have thought that in 2025 there would be a problem with democracy […] the worrying thing is that it’s not just recent democracies or unstable countries that relapse back to autocracy. The obvious case being the U.S, which we can see every day in the news. So, it’s unfortunate, but there is a reason to discuss democracy in 2025.”
Initially from a background in governance and public policy, when asked what his main motivation would be in studying democracy and governance, Professor Kübler replies, “I was interested in how the state works and how it does things and how public policies are formulated and implemented, what effects they had”.
On his shift towards focusing on democracy he says, “At some point I got interested in, are these policies still democratically legitimate, and what is the role of democratically elected politicians in policy making? And from there on, we saw that, that was the 1990’s, so there was a huge movement of changing the way states act”.
As Dr. Kübler’s research is mainly carried out in Switzerland, he spoke to the University Observer about what studying democracy is like in such a country, saying “there’s a lot of myths about Swiss democracy, which, when you live in a country day to day, you know they’re not true, there's also a lot of misconceptions of the issues and problems of Swiss democracy”, before adding, “I haven't ever lived somewhere else and studied democracy somewhere else. There’s a lot of debate on democracy, theoretical and empirical and it's good to be able to test this in the Swiss context. So if we want to study direct democracy in public participation, Switzerland is obviously a good lab to do that.”
In his most recent research that focused on deliberative mini publics (DMPs) in Switzerland, Professor Kübler’s study found that citizen support for DMPs were stronger when they also held trust in their fellow citizens to make politically sound decisions. We ask, how viable are DMPs in a society that is highly polarised or divided? Professor Kübler explains the conclusions of this research as being, “very comparable to places where deliberative mini publics would be more of an innovation than in Switzerland”.
He states that, “In a deeply polarised society, I don’t think it is impossible for mini publics to work in a polarised setting”. Professor Kübler then brings up the case of Ireland in discussing this point, “if you think about the Irish Citizen Assembly, the first ones that have been done were on issues that were extremely polarised in Ireland. So my view from the outside is, if you can do a citizen assembly on abortion and same sex marriage in Ireland, you can do it anywhere”.
Given the current global democratic climate where democratic backsliding is on the rise, what are the ways people can become encouraged to promote and partake in democracy everyday? Professor Kübler expresses that, “I think the important thing is that one should work against the idea that democracy is about losing or winning”. He advises to “make sure that you don’t demonise your opponent - you always have to consider people with a different political opinion as human beings”.