Swiss Party Research Articles

Strategic Overshooting in National Council Elections

The Swiss party system has become strongly polarized over the last decade, following the rise of the Swiss People's Party and the electoral losses of center parties. This article suggests that these developments are, at least in part, a consequence of strategic behaviour among voters. As the government policy is the result of institutionalized multiparty bargaining, voters have incentives to compensate for this watering‐down by supporting parties whose positions are more extreme than their own. This article empirically tests extent and conditions of compensatory voting in the 2007 National Council Elections using Selects survey data. Our results suggest that compensatory voting generally outweighs voting based on ideological proximity and increases with rising district magnitude.

Protest Politics in a Changing Political Context: Switzerland, 1975–2005

This article analyses if and how recent changes within the Swiss political system have influenced different aspects of protest politics (e.g. level, issues, action repertoires, and transnationalization). We argue that opportunities for mobilization have emerged in recent years due to changes in the institutionalized political context and that these changes have at least partially led to a resurgence of protest activities in the early 2000s. In a longitudinal perspective, it is however rather moderate. Additionally, new social movements still dominate Swiss protest politics. Although social and migration‐related questions gained in salience, the changes are not as dramatic as in the case of party politics. The rise of a new integration‐demarcation cleavage has not (yet) shaken Swiss protest politics as heavily as Swiss party politics. Finally, even though they are not integrated into a pronounced new protest cycle, the early 2000s are marked by the global justice movement. In this context, we observe a slight radicalization of the action repertoire and police reactions, which is at least partially explained by the emergence of new “transnational” sites of contention.

Left—Right Positions of Political Parties in Switzerland

As theoretical models of policy processes have become more ambitious, scholars have been relying more and more frequently on the policy positions of the relevant actors. Different methods are feasible in deriving these policy positions, but few have been applied to the Swiss parties. In this article, we offer estimates of policy positions for the Swiss political parties using various methods. Our main goal is to assess changes over time of these positions. On comparing the estimates obtained by the various methods, we offer insights on which estimates are preferable and in what contexts. Given the particular characteristics of the Swiss political system, namely a federal country with a non-parliamentary system of government, we also assess the degree to which the Swiss federal parties are unified.

Swiss political parties: Between persistence and change

From a comparative perspective, two aspects of the Swiss party system are particularly salient: the large number of parties and the relative stability of the distribution of power. Apart from social and cultural cleavages, the electoral system (PR), the competitiveness encouraged by the federal state and direct democracy can be seen as responsible for party proliferation in Switzerland. 1 Political stability stems from the integrative force of consociationalism, which has its roots in the small size of the country, its political culture, and the system of direct democracy. In Switzerland the most important parties are continuously represented in government, and there is no change of power between the parties in government and the parties in opposition. The composition of the national, as well as almost all cantonal, governments quite often remains unchanged over a long period. Since 1959, the national government, for example, has consisted of two members of the Radical Democrats (FDP), the Christian Democrats (CVP) and the Social Democrats (SPS), and one of the Swiss People’s Party (SVP). This composition is commonly referred to as the ‘magic formula’. The combination of a large number of parties and political stability is not without interest, since the literature on party research, influenced by the experience of the Weimar Republic, the French Fourth Republic, and postwar Italy, for long treated multi-party systems as inherently unstable compared with two-party systems, such as that of Great Britain. 2 However, in the last few years the Swiss party system seems to have become less stable. The 1995 and 1999 national elections brought about remarkable shifts in voting. The question is: will Swiss politics enter a period of instability and will there be serious changes in the party system? To grasp the importance of these changes, analyses restricted to the national level might be too narrow. It is a commonly accepted characteristic of the

Integrating ‘new polities’ into ‘old polities’: The Swiss party elite

This article offers a new approach to the important question of ‘New Polities’. After discussing various interpretations of the phenomenon, it proposes a conceptualisation on the basis of empirical data drawn from a study of the Swiss party elite. These data show that a New Politics dimension can effectively be measured, and that the ‘left‐right’ axis can be considered to represent an almost perfect synthesis between ‘Old’ and ‘New’ politics.

Conservatism in Switzerland: A Study in Antimodernism

As in Great Britain, the term 'conservatism' has an established place in Swiss history and politics.' Two meanings may be distinguished, one general, one particular; when written with a small c, the word may be taken as roughly synonymous with 'traditionalist'; with a capital, it usually refers to those political parties of Switzerland which include 'Conservative' in their official name. However, the word has disappeared from today's Swiss party labels.