Activities

Besides research projects, publications and seminar series, we organise a wide range of activities including meetings and data archives. We are also an active member in national and international professional associations.

Institute of Political Science (IPW-HSG)
The IPW is a research unit within the broader political science community of the University of St.Gallen. Its goal is to promote academic research by managing funded projects, establish research centres, organise seminars and conferences, run continuing education courses, and publish journals and working paper series.

Centre for Security, Economics and Technology (C SET)
C SET is a research centre established with the support of the Swiss Federal Department of Defence, Civil Protection and Sport (VBS). It is an interdisciplinary institution directed towards the analysis of the conceptual, organisational, economic, and technological dimensions of state-provided security. It aims to ensure a high level of information exchange through the establishment of an international network with other institutions working in the field of security economics.

Governance in Vocational and Professional Education and Training (GOVPET)
The Leading House on Governance in Vocational and Professional Education and Training (GOVPET) is a Centre of Excellence funded by the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI). The GOVPET research program focuses on how decentralized cooperation in skill formation is made possible given the ever-present threat of cooperation breakdown. In addition, we examine how public policies can get private actors to consider societal goals in decentralized cooperation that are not necessarily in the interest of these private actors.

Center for Energy Innovation, Governance and Investment (EGI-HSG)
The Center for Energy Innovation, Governance and Investment (EGI-HSG), established in early 2014, bundles the expertise and competence at the University of St.Gallen in energy research. EGI-HSG provides the scientific basis for decision-making processes in business and politics. The University of St.Gallen and its partners from academia, industry and public administration aim at providing a valuable contribution to the implementation of the Swiss Energy Strategy 2050.

Intra- and Inter-Societal Sources of Instability in the Caucasus and EU Opportunities to Respond (ISSICEU)
ISSICEU is an EU sponsored research project of eight partners from Azerbaijan, Germany, Georgia, the Russian Federation, Switzerland and Turkey. Led by Prof. Dirk Lehmkuhl and Dr. Katharina Hoffmann the project explores four key issues: (a) “hybrid political regimes”, i.e. intra-societal frictions and their regional impact on political configurations, (b)”civic participation”, i.e. the interplay of religious and state actors and practices on civic participation, (c) “economic interdependencies”, i.e. patterns of economic exchange flows and interdependencies in the broader Caucasus region and (d) “external actors”, i.e. influences from thegeographical neighbourhoods with a particular focus on Turkey and Iran.

The Politics of Informal Governance (link)
Funded by the Swiss Network for International Studies (SNIS), this international and multi-disciplinary research project examines the factors that lead states and transnational actors to choose between formal and informal international institutions to structure their interactions and govern global problems. It will fill an important gap in research on international cooperation and global governance by taking systematic account of a wider spectrum of institutional variation than existing research. Furthermore, the accurate knowledge about the factors that shape the emergence and functioning of informal forms of governing will help policy-makers to effectively provide public goods and enhance the legitimacy, equity, and efficiency of global governance institutions.

The "Constituency-Level Elections Archive" (CLEA)
CLEA is the largest and most authoritative data archive on election results at the level of single constituencies world-wide. Its coverage is global, and historically it includes time series since the beginning of competitive elections. The CLEA project is carried out in collaboration with the University of Michigan. The goal of CLEA is to collect, process and consolidate data in one comprehensive and reliable reference resource that is ready for analysis and publicly available at no cost.

International collaborations
Besides numerous research collaborations and institutional collaborations between research programmes at our department with universities around the world, our members are active in various associations among which:

The International Political Science Association (IPSA)
The European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR)
The Swiss Political Science Association (SPSA).

Conferences and congresses
We host and organise numerous conferences, congresses and workshops, such as

the ECPR Joint Sessions of Workshops in April 2011.
The meeting of the Council of Europe in June 2010 bringing together politicians, academics, representatives of the civil society and international organisation from all member countries.
The annual congress of the Swiss Political Science Association in January 2009.

We host and organise as well:

The annual congress of the Swiss Political Science Association in January 2017.