Switzerland's Regulatory European Integration: Between Tacit Consensus and Noisy Dissensus

Abstract

AbstractSwitzerland's relationship with the EU is closely related to some of the transformations of domestic politics during the last decades. This contribution analyses the development of Switzerland's legal integration measures over time and explores their correlation with indicators of domestic political change, namely party positions and the salience of European integration in the electorate. It suggests that party positions and issue salience of European integration did not prevent the rather dynamic development of Switzerland's legal integration measures for two reasons: On the one hand, parties were generally in favour of the ‘bilateral way’ and related policies and European integration lost salience over the twenty years under study. On the other hand, a considerable share of legal integration measures was conducted by the government and the federal administration following mechanisms foreseen in the sectoral agreements. These measures as well as domestic rule transpositions proved not to be related to indicators of domestic political change, whereas legal integration measures in need of approval by parliament were correlated to party positions and issue salience. The analysis builds on an empirical dataset including all sectoral agreements and all federal laws transposing EU rules in the period 1990 – 2010. The results are based on descriptive analyses and Poisson regression estimates.