Political Decision-Making in Switzerland / Challenges to Democracy in the 21st Century (PDF)

Pascal Sciarini is Professor of Swiss and Comparative Politics at the Department of Political Science and International Relations, University of Geneva, Switzerland.

Manuel Fischer is Researcher at the Department of Environmental Social Sciences at Eawag, Dübendorf, and lecturer at the Institute of Political Science, University of Bern, Switzerland.

Denise Traber is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Political Science, University of Zurich, Switzerland.

'Is Swiss democracy still the slow-moving consensual model that Arend Lijphart described many years ago? Or have the European Union, globalization, immigration, the Swiss Peoples' Party, changes in bank secrecy regulations, and other factors transformed the political system into something else? In this major new book, three Swiss scholars, basing their analyses on hundreds of interviews and close examination of well chosen empirical cases of policymaking processes, show not only how Swiss democracy has been transformed, but why. It is an important and timely examination of, among other things, the impact of the EU on states that are not even members and the effects of immigrant-focused political parties not just on immigration policy, but on the workings of a nation's political institutions more broadly. It will be of interest to students of comparative politics, parties, direct democracy, and policymaking processes whether or not those readers hold a keen interest in the Swiss case itself.'

Prof. Frank Baumgartner, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA

'Replication studies are very rare in our discipline of political science. This is why I am particularly pleased with this replication of my own study of the Swiss political system that covered its structure and functioning back in the 1970s. The present study shows how much Swiss politics have changed over the last thirty years and how political power has been rebalanced, at the expense of corporatist policy-making, and in favor of partisan politics, as well as bureaucratic and intergovernmental policy-making. But the present study is far more than just a replication of my earlier work. In addition to the changes in the functioning of this paradigmatic case of a consensus democracy, this truly excellent study also documents the variation of Swiss political decision-making across policy domains, and it assesses its overall character under contemporary circumstances: it suggests that,