Popular Votes and Algorithms in Switzerland: Intransparent Priorisation of Political Information

AI-driven systems – such as web search engines and chatbots – are
increasingly used by Swiss citizens to fi nd information on political
issues, for example in the context of popular votes and elections.
This creates both new possibilities, but also risks for the functionality
of Swiss democracy. A key risk is related to the systems’ tendency
to individualize the information delivery by providing different results
to different users on the basis of location, the language of the user input,
or the formulation of the query. In the case of a multilingual direct
democracy, such treatment can result in information inequalities
between regions and languages that have to be taken seriously not
least also in the light of other known risks such as societal polarization
or the spread of misinformation.
To illustrate the risks caused by such AI-driven information inequalities,
this whitepaper presents as a case study the recent popular
vote on the «climate protection law» in June 2023. An analysis of
data from Google – the search engine used by 86% of the Swiss
population – shows that depending on the language (i.e. German,
Italian, or French) and the formulation of the search query, Google
prioritizes different information sources and different viewpoints on
the vote. Queries in different languages resulted in unequal visibility of
information sources in the top results, including websites of Swiss political
parties advocating for or against the law. This has consequences
in two dimensions:
• It may result in advantaging or disadvantaging specifi c parties or
politicians in relation to particular political issues – without, however,
any transparency regarding how these AI-driven systems
prioritize information for potential voters. This can facilitate the
manipulation of the Swiss public sphere by foreign and domestic
actors.
• It may interfere with Swiss citizens receiving a fair representation
of the range of political positions on specifi c political issues. Particularly
in the context of Switzerland’s direct democracy, such
fair representation is crucial for participating in political decision-
making, in particular as AI-driven systems increasingly become
a prominent source of information.
By providing unequal access to information about politics, AI-driven
systems can infl uence the ability of different groups of citizens to
participate in popular votes and elections and, thus, challenge the
functionality of Swiss democracy.