His wide-ranging research interests include the study of direct democracy, social movements, political parties and interest groups, public opinion, the public sphere and political communication.
He was the director of a Swiss national research programme on "Challenges to democracy in the 21st century" from 2005 to 2012.
From 2014 to 2019 he has been the principal investigator of the ERC project "Political Conflict in Europe in the Shadow of the Great Recession".
[2] Since summer 2019, Kriesi is one of the three principal investigators of the SOLID project that investigates the novel conflicts about sovereignty, solidarity, and identity in the European Union and asks what made them emerge and escalate during a series of recent crises.
[3] Kriesi won the Francqui chair for the 2015–2016[4] and in 2017 the Mattei Dogan Foundation Prize in European Political Sociology.