Switzerland: Contentious Citizenship Attribution in a Federal State

Abstract

Whereas, in most countries, citizenship attribution is regulated at the central level of the state, in Switzerland each municipality is accorded the right to decide who can become a Swiss citizen. Even villages of as few as 400 inhabitants have their own formal procedures and criteria by which ‘alien residents’ are to be naturalised. The Swiss case thus provides a unique opportunity for studying how membership criteria are established in negotiation processes between local politicians, and for understanding how such processes are influenced by different perspectives on citizenship by municipal actors. One consequence of different citizenship regulations and practices is that rejection rates vary significantly from one municipality to another. The goal of this paper is to explain why some municipalities pursue more restrictive citizenship policies than others. The paper uses data collected in 14 municipality case studies and 180 semi-structured interviews with local politicians, and shows that citizenship politics not only depends on different understandings of citizenship, but also on how powerful actors succeed in implementing their visions of what it means to be a Swiss citizen.