The dataset contains the anonymised results of a cross-sectional survey of eligible voters conducted following a popular vote on 22 September 2024. The vote concerned two subjects:
- The popular Initiative "For the future of our nature and our landscape" ("Biodiversity Initiative"), FSO proposal no. 671
- A referendum regarding the "Amendment to the federal law on retirement, survivors’ and disability pension plans (BVG/LPP)" ("Reform of the occupational pension system"), FSO proposal no. 672
Topics covered in the survey include voting decisions, arguments concerning the ballot measures, political knowledge, values, and beliefs, media consumption, and a survey experiment on political advertisements.
Data is provided in SAV, RDS, and CSV formats. SAV is the primary target format, and researchers are advised to use this version where possible. The SAV file contains user-defined missing variable levels. Users working in an R programming environment may wish to ensure that their chosen method of data import does not simply coerce these to simple "NA"s.
Due to anonymity reasons, some variables are not included in the downloadable dataset, or provided with a reduced level of precision. This concerns:
- The place of residence at the municipality level (omitted)
- Client device metadata (omitted; a separate variable indicating whether the survey was filled out on a mobile or a desktop platform is included)
- Variables related to respondents' current or previous occupation (plain text answers omitted; ISCO-08-coded variables have their precision reduced from the unit group level to the major group level)
- Variables related to respondents' country of birth, as well as the countries of birth of their parents (reduced to dummy variables indicating whether or not the country of birth is Switzerland)
We additionally omit variables solely collected for internal purposes of the DDS21 project; this concerns items measuring satisfaction with the survey, as well as free-form comments about the survey.
These variables are only available on request and with prior consent of the authors. Please send an e-mail with your justified request to dataservice@fors.unil.ch. The DDS21 project was approved by the Ethics Committee of the University Zurich (UZH PhF Ethics Committee, number 23.05.04).
