The Supply-Side of Digitalization Politics: Evidence from Switzerland

The ongoing digital revolution is transforming societies and generating far-reaching political challenges, from misinformation to labor-market disruption. Yet, despite its growing salience, political parties rarely campaign on digitalization issues, and their policy proposals often appear consensual or vague. Addressing this puzzle, we analyze how parties (fail to) structure digitalization issues in Switzerland—a likely early case of politicization given its status as an innovation hub. Moving beyond party manifesto analyses, we combine several complementary data sources. Our core analysis uses large language models and transformer-based methods to analyze over 1.7 million parliamentary interventions (1999–2023) and identify digitalization-related debates, mapping party and MP positions along a liberal–restrictive dimension and across key topics. We further analyze roll-call votes on 69 digitalization-related affairs and self-reported policy preferences from over 5,000 candidates collected through a digitalization-focused VAA. Preliminary findings indicate that traditional partisan alignments poorly explain positions on digitalization. Further analyses will explore whether socio-demographic factors better account for MPs’ preferences. This paper contributes to understanding the role of politicians and parties in the incipient (de)structuring of political conflict over digitalization.