Swiss System Research Articles

Swiss Public Administration. Making the State Work Successfully. Ladner, Andreas, Soguel, Nils, Emery, Yves, Weerts, Sophie and StéphaneNahrath (eds) Cham, Palgrave Macmillan (2019), 384 p., ISBN 978‐3‐319‐92380‐2

Swiss Public Administration. Making the State Work Successfully. Ladner, Andreas, Soguel, Nils, Emery, Yves, Weerts, Sophie and StéphaneNahrath (eds) Cham, Palgrave Macmillan (2019), 384 p., ISBN 978‐3‐319‐92380‐2

The Effect of Different Features for Educational Computer-Based Competition Environments

Educational computer-based competition environments need to be designed with a set of features that enhance the learning process. Although recently some frameworks for the design of educational computer-based systems (e.g., educational games) have been proposed, they do not focus on the details of the competition. Therefore, the design of educational computer-based competition environments is still an open issue. We propose the 4NESS framework for the design of such competition environments. This framework classifies the competition features into four dimensions: easiness, fairness, awareness, and adaptiveness. We designed the ISCARE educational computer-based competition environment implementing these four dimensions to evaluate and validate some included features for competition, and conducted experiments during three consecutive years. Students considered the computer-based competition environment with the proposed features, including a modification of the Swiss system, to be very easy to use, fair for pairing students, moderately fair for calculating scores, with good awareness of their state during the competition and that of their peers, and with contents of appropriate level, especially for the group working with adaptive contents. Adaptation of contents made students increase their learning gains in 0.5 sigmas during the competition. Pairings were seen as with students of similar levels. And final scores were moderately fair: while the order tends to be similar as compared to the results in the post-test, students grades with high performance tend to be lower in the competition environment.

Medication safety in Switzerland: Where are we today?

Empirical research shows that medication safety is an urgent area of concern in the Swiss healthcare system. Adverse drug events and medication errors are common and risks such as polypharmacy are widespread. No comprehensive national strategy explicitly dedicated to medication safety exists in Switzerland. The federalist system of government with relative autonomy of the cantons relating to healthcare laws influences the implementation of national healthcare reforms, also to the disadvantage of medication safety. Direct dispensing of drugs by the prescribing physician is permitted in almost all German-speaking cantons. This special feature of the Swiss system implies specific challenges for medication safety. Nonetheless, there is an increasing number of national activities dealing with various aspects of medication safety, such as the "progress!" programmes within the National Quality Strategy. Within the National Research Programme "Smarter Health Care" (NRP74) of the Swiss National Science Foundation, several research projects are currently focusing on medication safety. Clinical pharmacy activities in hospitals are relatively widespread. In the primary care sector, pharmaceutical care practice and the corresponding competencies for pharmacists are being further developed. However, acomprehensive strategy, priority-setting and effectiveness studies involving all stakeholders are required in order for the Swiss healthcare system, to meet the challenges facing medication safety in aforward-looking manner.

On the ranking of a Swiss system chess team tournament

The paper suggests a family of paired comparison-based scoring procedures for ranking the participants of a Swiss system chess team tournament. We present the challenges of ranking in Swiss system, the features of individual and team competitions as well as the failures of the official rankings based on lexicographical order. The tournament is represented as a ranking problem such that the linearly-solvable row sum (score), generalized row sum, and least squares methods have favourable axiomatic properties. Two chess team European championships are analysed as case studies. Final rankings are compared by their distances and visualized with multidimensional scaling (MDS). Differences to the official ranking are revealed by the decomposition of the least squares method. Rankings are evaluated by prediction power, retrodictive performance, and stability. The paper argues for the use of least squares method with a results matrix favouring match points on the basis of its relative insensitivity to the choice between match and board points, retrodictive accuracy, and robustness.

Making Apprenticeships Profitable for Firms and Apprentices: The Swiss Model

The author discusses the success of the Swiss system of apprenticeships. The famous German apprenticeship system requires that firms make an investment in their students, he writes, but the interesting Swiss system makes it possible to recoup such investments by the end of the training period without substantial state aid. High training standards contribute to a significant return on their education for apprentices.

Introduction to the Special Issue: New Media, Old Money: Digital Technology, Social Media, and the Challenges to Campaigning and Democracy

Electronic media have played a central role in politics almost since their introduction. The role of media in election campaigns is often seen as the origin of media and communication studies. The variety of political systems worldwide, the wide range of media systems that operate within them, and the extensive array of regulatory schemes that govern this association raise thought-provoking questions about the role of media in democracy. The media–politics–capital triad has raised concerns about the effect of money on the health and fairness of political and media structures. The use of digital technologies and collaborative media has now become a critical part of these complex relationships.Increasingly, political campaigns are built around digital strategies rather than traditional broadcast ad buys. The Internet offers many additional groups cheap access to the public sphere and new possibilities for information and discussion. Accordingly, much of the most “impactful” money is spent “online,” calling on expertise in building networks, conversations, and communities using social networking platforms, combined with applications designed to amplify messaging. At the same time, volunteers and users generate their own content. In addition, the ability to find, analyze, and apply personal information from “big data” is becoming more important than market research and the focus has shifted to the development of comprehensive social media strategies for young, ethnic, gendered, and special interest groups. Finally, legacy media and their traditional business models are affected by change as well, raising questions about implications of the Internet for journalism and democracy.As a result, any current understanding of campaign spending and political communication must incorporate not just traditional advertising, but equal spending on Internet and social networking platforms, and the use of information technologies to identify and reach voters through multiple platforms. The same “Old Money” is being used to try to gain influence, but new media offer new approaches both to enhance and conceal its effects. Moreover, the same media brands with the same powerful owners prevail online as well.In order to discuss these issues, the Institute for Information Policy at Penn State, the Department of Communication and Media Research at the University of Fribourg, and the Journal of Information Policy held a two-day workshop at the Embassy of Switzerland in Washington, DC, in September 2015. The three articles presented in this special issue were first presented at that workshop.In the first, Linards Udris, Mark Eisenegger, and Jörg Schneider examine whether money talks in political campaign coverage, using the unique Swiss system of direct-democratic campaigns as their context. They conclude that votes involving expensive campaigns and populist proposals correlate with high media attention, favoring large parties—in the Swiss case, the populist right-wing Swiss People's Party. With the addition of the effect of the media's self-interests, the result is that the news media in Switzerland fail to cover a truly wide diversity of actors and topics.In the next article, Christopher Ali takes a broad view on the value of local journalism for political discourse. He argues that while local journalism is often categorized as a public good, the discourse of public goods is insufficient to fully capture their social democratic importance. He proposes to regard them as merit goods, which may lead to increased regulatory support for their sustenance and encourage efforts to support their viability.In the final contribution, John Fortunato and Shannon Martin discuss how the agenda-setting function of the media has transformed with the rise in importance of social media networking applications as purveyors of political communications, as well as as a result of the makeover of campaign financing practices following the US Supreme Court decision in Citizens United. Both changes have made political advertising more central in setting the agenda.

The construction of "official outlaws". Social-psychological and educational implications of a deterrent asylum policy.

With the increasing numbers of immigrants seeking to obtain political asylum, the receiving conditions and the deportability of refused asylum seekers have emerged as major issues. Concern with these questions has been addressed through renewed asylum policies involving expeditious processing of applications, tight restrictions upon the right to work, removal of support or detention for failed asylum seekers. These asylum policies are intended to reduce alleged “pull factors” through the use of the threat of destitution as a deterrent against asylum seeking (Da Lomba, 2006). They also aim at reducing the number of asylum seekers that remain in the territory despite having been rejected as refugees. In this regard, the deterioration of the conditions of reception is seen across the EU as one cornerstone of a “voluntary departure” policy (Fox O'Mahony and Sweeney, 2010). In this article, we examine the case of Switzerland, where the suppression of social assistance for rejected asylum seekers was intended to support such a policy. We report data from a field study showing how, in this country, this policy induces institutional practices that prevent, rather than promote, failed asylum seekers to leave the territory. We also discuss some implications of the Swiss system in the realm of education, suggesting that the institutional constraints imposed by the asylum policy jeopardize the implementation of the recognized unconditional right of children to education.

Flows of engineered nanomaterials through the recycling process in Switzerland

The use of engineered nanomaterials (ENMs) in diverse applications has increased during the last years and this will likely continue in the near future. As the number of applications increase, more and more waste with nanomaterials will be generated. A portion of this waste will enter the recycling system, for example, in electronic products, textiles and construction materials. The fate of these materials during and after the waste management and recycling operations is poorly understood. The aim of this work is to model the flows of nano-TiO2, nano-ZnO, nano-Ag and CNT in the recycling system in Switzerland. The basis for this study is published information on the ENMs flows on the Swiss system. We developed a method to assess their flow after recycling. To incorporate the uncertainties inherent to the limited information available, we applied a probabilistic material flow analysis approach. The results show that the recycling processes does not result in significant further propagation of nanomaterials into new products. Instead, the largest proportion will flow as waste that can subsequently be properly handled in incineration plants or landfills. Smaller fractions of ENMs will be eliminated or end up in materials that are sent abroad to undergo further recovery processes. Only a reduced amount of ENMs will flow back to the productive process of the economy in a limited number of sectors. Overall, the results suggest that risk assessment during recycling should focus on occupational exposure, release of ENMs in landfills and incineration plants, and toxicity assessment in a small number of recycled inputs.

Why is Turnout So Low in Switzerland? Comparing the Attitudes of Swiss and German Citizens Towards Electoral Democracy

Why is Turnout So Low in Switzerland? Comparing the Attitudes of Swiss and German Citizens Towards Electoral Democracy

Application of the Meikirch Model to independent medical evaluations for Social Security eligibility determinations in Switzerland and potential for use by physicians in many other situations.

The Meikirch Model of Bircher and Kuruvilla provides a new and very interesting definition of health and disease, based on a biopsychosocial framework and the idea of an interaction of an individual with social and environmental determinants of health. It is a modern systems approach, not only for acute, but particularly for chronic diseases. For this reason, I have adopted this analytic approach for conducting independent medical evaluations in the Swiss system of Social Security.

Intergenerational Transfers and the Stability of the Swiss Retirement System

We analyse intended and unintended solidarity transfers between the young and the old in the Swiss retirement system. In addition to the intended solidarity transfers in the pay-as-you-go system, we identify a systematic unintended solidarity transfer from the active population to new retirees in the occupational pension system, which occurs due to the statutory conversion rates not being actuarially fair. After providing an overview of intergenerational transfers in Switzerland, we briefly review the Swiss retirement system. Then, we quantify the unintended transfer in the occupational pension system and finish by discussing several policy measures that could be implemented to avoid this intergenerational transfer. The unintended solidarity transfer casts some doubt on the financial stability and social acceptability of the Swiss retirement system, which is often considered one of the best in the world. As such, the problems of and recommendations for the Swiss system are of interest to other pension systems as well.

Homogeneity, the free movement of persons and integration without membership: Mission Impossible?

This article provides a detailed legal comparison of the free movement and residence rights, including mutual recognition of qualifications and social security co-ordination, accorded to nationals of the four EFTA States: Norway, Iceland, Liechtenstein and Switzerland. The first half considers the extent to which the EEA Agreement, which relates to the former three countries, secures homogeneity in this area of law; and the second half looks at the EU-Swiss framework for the same purposes. It concludes that the EEA framework, through the activism of its Court, goes a long way to securing homogeneity—to the extent of equating nationality of an EEA-EFTA state with Union citizenship, at least for the purposes of movement and residence. The Swiss system, by contrast, fails miserably in this regard as the rights under the Swiss agreement still mirror those prior to Directive 2004/38.

Are academically weak youths really not ready for vocational training?

For several years, there is an increasing discussion in Germany that youths are less and less ready for vocational training. According to these reports that have been published by employers’ representatives, there exists a relatively high share of youths whose cognitive competencies are too low to be successfully integrated into the German dual training system. Our article aims at investigating the maturity of youths with low cognitive competencies in a longitudinal design for Switzerland. The Swiss educational system resembles the German educational system in various main aspects and PISA has shown that the share of pupils with low competencies is comparably high in both countries. For our empirical analyses, we will use youth panel data from the Swiss TREE study which allows us to identify youths with low cognitive competencies and to follow their training trajectories after finishing compulsory schooling. Our results show that in the German neighbour Switzerland also youths with low competencies can be successfully integreated into the vocational training system. In contrast to Germany, the Swiss system thus is far more successful in offering also academically weak youths to obtain vocational training.

The Idiosyncrasies of Contemporary Swiss Security Policy and Practice: A Strategic Culture-Based Explanation

The peculiarities of Swiss security policy since the end of the Cold War are best explained not through Switzerland's structural position but through its unique strategic culture. Compared to other European neutrals, there are three particular idiosyncratic expressions of Switzerland's neutrality: strict adherence to institutional non-alignment in Swiss foreign and security policy; the Swiss army's militia principle; and the Swiss system of civil defence. Given their relative persistence despite radical changes in the strategic environment, these idiosyncrasies deserve more research attention and more theoretical scrutiny. This article argues that an examination of Swiss strategic culture, based on historical and identity narratives as well as public opinion, best explains the puzzle of distinctiveness. The article highlights the importance of the vernacular in conceptualizations of strategic culture, and explores the explanatory utility of strategic culture compared to explanations based on realist or institutional factors derived from rationalist theories. Strategic culture reveals current constraints imposed upon policymakers as well as ideological resources available for new directions in security policy. This analysis shows there is little room within Swiss strategic culture for a transformation of security policy, but there are opportunities for a discursive transformation of Swiss identity and strategic culture that allow for a better use of strategic and military resources.

Explaining regional variations in health care utilization between Swiss cantons using panel econometric models

BackgroundIn spite of a detailed and nation-wide legislation frame, there exist large cantonal disparities in consumed quantities of health care services in Switzerland. In this study, the most important factors of influence causing these regional disparities are determined. The findings can also be productive for discussing the containment of health care consumption in other countries.MethodsBased on the literature, relevant factors that cause geographic disparities of quantities and costs in western health care systems are identified. Using a selected set of these factors, individual panel econometric models are calculated to explain the variation of the utilization in each of the six largest health care service groups (general practitioners, specialist doctors, hospital inpatient, hospital outpatient, medication, and nursing homes) in Swiss mandatory health insurance (MHI). The main data source is 'Datenpool santésuisse', a database of Swiss health insurers.ResultsFor all six health care service groups, significant factors influencing the utilization frequency over time and across cantons are found. A greater supply of service providers tends to have strong interrelations with per capita consumption of MHI services. On the demand side, older populations and higher population densities represent the clearest driving factors.ConclusionsStrategies to contain consumption and costs in health care should include several elements. In the federalist Swiss system, the structure of regional health care supply seems to generate significant effects. However, the extent of driving factors on the demand side (e.g., social deprivation) or financing instruments (e.g., high deductibles) should also be considered.

Cost–effectiveness of raltegravir in HIV/AIDS

Raltegravir is a first-in-class HIV-1 integrase inhibitor with established antiviral efficacy in treatment-naive and treatment-experienced patients with multidrug-resistant HIV-1 infection. In this article, we summarize pharmacoeconomic evaluations of raltegravir-based treatment regimens, compared with alternative therapies, in the treatment of patients with HIV infection and/or AIDS. Cost–effectiveness evaluations of raltegravir in treatment-experienced patients conducted using a continuous-time, state-transition Markov cohort model suggest that raltegravir, combined with optimized background therapy, falls within the range that would generally be considered cost effective compared with optimized therapy alone in Spanish, Swiss and UK health systems. In treatment-naive populations, raltegravir was evaluated using a three-stage continuous-time state-transition cohort model. Raltegravir-based initiation treatment strategies (first-line raltegravir) were compared with protease inhibitor and non-nucleoside reverse-transcriptase inhibitor initiation strategies, in which raltegravir was retained for salvage therapy. First-line raltegravir was cost-effective versus retaining raltegravir for salvage therapy in several European populations. A separate economic model was used to evaluate first-line raltegravir against two alternative initiation regimens representing standard clinical practice in Australia; raltegravir proved to be cost effective in both scenarios. In all studies examined, results were sensitive to factors including treatment duration, mortality rate, analytic time horizon, health utility weights, cost of raltegravir and optimized therapy, incidence of opportunistic infection and discount rates. Nonetheless, raltegravir remained cost effective under most scenarios.

Annuitization and Cross-Subsidies in the Swiss System of Retirement Savings

The Swiss second pillar of retirement saving features unique properties and remarkable outcomes. These include both high levels of savings and (unforced) annuitization, as well as a non-trivial level of internal cross-subsidies between the two tiers of the system. We formulate a quantitative model of financial flows within this system. We then analyze the significant cross-subsidies in Switzerland's system and discuss their interaction with the high level of annuitization. We also touch on some of the issues the Swiss system is currently facing. Furthermore, we discuss how this extraordinary system can be seen as a generalization of the World Bank (1994) plain vanilla system of forced savings. This broader model consists of two tiers of second pillar savings together with gazetted annuity rates which allow for internal cross-subsidies that can be used to encourage annuitization in one of the tiers.

On the vulnerability of the swiss system of coherent quantum cryptography to an attack with repeated measurements

It has been shown that the coherent quantum cryptography protocol (Coherent One Way) and, correspondingly, fiber optic systems involving this protocol for quantum key distribution, are vulnerable to an attack with repeated measurements and do not guarantee the security of distributed keys in a communication channel with losses. The coherent quantum cryptography system is used in Switzerland as one of the key distribution channels in the framework of the network project SECOQC (SEcure COmmunications based on Quantum Cryptography). A critical attack with repeated measurements was missed when the cryptographic strength of this protocol was analyzed. The critical length of the communication channel has been determined; this is a value above which secure key distribution is certainly impossible. Beginning with the critical length, an eavesdropper knows the entire distributed key, does not introduce errors at the receiver end, and remains undetected. For typical parameters in a real system (the average photon number μ = 0.5 and the quantum efficiency of avalanche detectors η = 0.1, see N. Gisin, G. Ribordy, H. Zbinden, et al., arXiv:quant-ph/0411022 and D. Stucki, C. Barreiro, S. Fasel, et al., arXiv:quant-ph/08095264), the security of keys cannot be guaranteed even for a communication channel whose length is as small as wished.

The Swiss social insurance system: Social security and grass-roots democracy

The foundations of Switzerland's social insurance system can be traced to 1890 when a public referendum voted the inclusion of an article into the Federal Constitution that gave the executive the task of creating a sickness and accident insurance scheme. Currently, as in other European countries, the Swiss social insurance system is facing challenges as a result of rising health costs and demographic shifts, which are placing a growing burden on both public finances and private households. To reach policy decisions to address these challenges, the Swiss system is distinguishable from those of its European neighbours because of a continuing tradition of political decision-making based on grass-roots democracy: through referenda, the Swiss people remain directly responsible for the development of the national social insurance system. Importantly, not only might this unique feature of Swiss democracy lead the Swiss people more readily to accept and identify with their social insurance system but it may offer a sound democratic base upon which to build a consensual approach to address the policy challenges that lie ahead.

Arbitrating Labor Disputes in Switzerland

Long regarded as against nature, the relationship between arbitration and labor law has generated a growing interest in recent years, with the realization that arbitration can be an effective tool for the resolution of individual employment disputes, especially for top-level managers or international athletes. The Swiss system broadly recognizes the arbitrability of individual employment disputes on an international level. On a domestic level, arbitrability of individual employment disputes is more limited following a decision of the Swiss Federal Tribunal of June 28, 2010. However, under the new Swiss Civil Code of Procedure, which will enter into force on January 1, 2011, parties to domestic arbitration agreements will be able to opt into the international regime and therefore possibly circumvent such limitation. Furthermore, the article discusses particularities related to arbitration agreements in collective employment contracts, as well as arbitration of collective labor disputes.