Yves Kläy

I am a doctoral researcher at the University of Fribourg, supervised by Prof. Dr. Reiner Eichenberger. My research examines how democratic institutions translate citizen preferences into political decisions. Using Switzerland’s system of representative and direct democracy, I study how legislators represent their constituents, how party discipline shapes collective decisions, how elected representatives influence referendum outcomes, and how official voter information affects political participation and vote choice. I combine parliamentary votes, referendum results, survey data, and political texts with causal inference, regression discontinuity designs, text-as-data methods, and experiments using calibrated language-model agents.

From February through July 2026, I am a visiting researcher at the ARC Training Centre for Behavioural Insights for Technology Adoption at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane.

I also work as a research assistant at the Institute for Swiss Economic Policy (IWP), in Lucerne. At the IWP, I conduct research on and contribute to the Parlameter, an interactive online tool that makes Swiss politics more transparent.