Switzerland is one of the few democracies that has regulated its political conflicts for a long time with very little violence. If we operationalize the degree of political violence by the number of deaths from domestic group violence per million population, Switzerland has the value zero for the period studied by the authors of the World Handbook of Political and Social Indicators (Russett et al., 1964). That is, from 1950 to 1962 nobody was killed in Switzerland for political reasons. Since 1962 the value has remained at zero; even the worldwide student unrest of recent years has been articulated in Switzerland with relatively little violence. This paper takes the case of Switzerland to test some hypotheses about the conditions for nonviolent patterns of conflict resolution in democratic systems. Most hypotheses that we have found in the literature are not particularly concerned with political nonviolence but rather with democratic stability. Nevertheless, since political nonviolence is usually considered to be one element of democratic stability (see, for instance, Wildenmann and Kaase, 1968), hypotheses about the conditions of democratic stability have also to be valid for the conditions of political nonviolence. Using the case of Switzerland to test such hypotheses requires, first, a description of the case itself. For this description we developed a system analysis model based especially on the works of Deutsch (1966) and Easton (1965). To fill this frame of reference we studied, by the method of participant observation, the following three decision-making processes: (1) The decision of the Swiss Confederation to give financial aid to the cantonal universities. (2) The decision of the Aargau Canton to found a new university. (3) The decision of the Liberal Party (Freisinnig-denwkratische Partei) about the program for a federal election. Besides these three case studies we undertook four survey studies about the political behavior of the citizens of Switzerland. Finally, we used for our description, insofar as possible, the whole literature about the Swiss political system. We abstracted from our data a total of 149 general observations about that political system. Space forbids enumerating all these observations here, or even giving the detailed description from which the observations were derived. (See Steiner, forthcoming.) The following observations will serve as an illustration: