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The chapter on the Swiss parliament offers an introduction of the institutional characteristics and functioning of the National Council and the Council of States, the two parliamentary chambers of the Swiss parliament. It elaborates how the Swiss parliamentarians are elected and discusses the composition and functions of this parliament. The specificities of this system, characterized by two equally powerful chambers, part-time national parliamentarians, very few administrative resources, and a lack of transparency in party and campaign financing, are outlined and explained in detail. In addition, the chapter measures the power of the Swiss parliament with an institutional power index based on its formal rights and compares the result with qualitative estimates of parliamentary and political experts to provide an encompassing estimate of the power of parliament. As two key developments that are particularly characteristic for this parliament in recent years, the increase in professionalization and the growing influence of interest groups and how they impact the Federal Assembly are discussed.

Global economic integration and global political restraint—this fine balance has characterized Switzerland’s relationship with the international community since the Swiss federal state was founded in 1848. Geopolitical change and crises, globalization, and the European integration process, however, have increasingly challenged this traditional model of Swiss foreign relations. With its entry into the UN (2002) and two sets of bilateral treaties with the EU (2000, 2005) Switzerland has taken significant steps towards a stronger political involvement in the international arena, even if a clear majority of Swiss voters, parliament, and the government remain opposed to EU membership. This chapter situates Switzerland in the global economy and in international politics. It begins by contextualizing Switzerland in its international environment and comparing it with its neighbours as well as some additional countries. The chapter then shows that Switzerland is one of the most ‘globalized’, i.e., most open countries in the world. Finally, it shows that the political system of Switzerland has slowly but noticeably reacted to European as well as the global political and economic changes of the recent past. Nevertheless, in respect of foreign policy, voters remain divided into two camps; these camps view the implications of increasing integration into the European and global arena very differently, in particular with regard to the consequences for sovereignty, neutrality, federalism, and direct democracy. This division generates considerable political controversies about the challenges Switzerland faces.

Direct democracy—instruments that allow for citizens’ direct participation in legislative politics—is one of the corner stones of the Swiss political system. The chapter starts with a descriptive exercise of illustrating the historic emergence of direct-democratic institutions in Switzerland, how the institutions were introduced, and how access to these instruments was made easier over time. Apart from this de jure perspective, it also looks at the de facto use of these institutions over the last 170 years and shows that the use of the different institutions follows different patterns. Building on the descriptive part, it turns to the direct and indirect effects of direct democracy on the working of representative democracy. Direct-democratic institutions disperse power by either adding a potential veto player (e.g., the optional referendum) or by extending the set of actors that have agenda-setting power (e.g., initiative). There is a discussion of how the presence of these institutions alters the rationale of political actors and by doing so affects political processes and outcomes. In the last part of the chapter, the discussion broadens the geographic focus and compares direct-democratic institutions in Swiss cantons with direct-democratic institutions in subnational units in Germany and Austria as well as in states in the US. The chapter concludes with an outlook on the future prospects of direct democracy, namely how the working of these institutions could be affected by increasing societal polarization and by the digital transformation.

This chapter focuses on the Swiss federal administration and its role in agenda-setting, decision-making, policy implementation, and providing an interface between elected politicians, interest groups, and citizens; it begins with an outline of the federal administration and its evolution over time and notes the ministerial structures of the federal administration. The history of administrative reforms is retraced through a discussion regarding ‘New Public Management’. Then, the Swiss administration is placed in an international perspective. Finally, the chapter presents the human resource management issues that the federal administration has faced since the ending of the permanent status of civil servants. The concluding section highlights four upcoming challenges related to the organization and management of the Swiss federal administration.

Family policy has become an increasingly important policy area in Switzerland since the 1990s. Benefits and services to families have undergone profound transformations. Some reforms became possible because family policy was increasingly defined not only as social policy but also as social investment policy promoting employment and human capital formation. This ambiguity enabled reforms to be supported by heterogeneous reform coalitions, even if long-term coalitions remain unstable and depend on the specific reform proposal. Despite these changes, Swiss family policy is still underdeveloped and falls behind that of other continental European countries. Government spending on family policy is low by international standards, and the use of formal childcare is strongly stratified by income. Important factors contributing to this slow pace of family policy modernization in Switzerland are the decentralized distribution of competences with different levels of government and the use of various direct democratic instruments to prevent or delay reform initiatives at different levels of governance. Moreover, the party system’s increasing political polarization slows down reform efforts and undermines reform coalitions between socially progressive and economically liberal forces. In the face of these challenges, the adaptation of family policy to changing social and economic needs has become a litmus test for the reform capacity of the Swiss welfare state.

Using a survey experiment, we test whether discrimination against job candidates with a second-generation migration background varies by signaling either assimilation into the host society or attachment to the country of origin. In our study, Swiss HR managers evaluate descriptions of fictitious CVs in which we vary the origin, language proficiency, and extracurricular activity of the jobseekers with and without a cultural context. The findings reveal that candidates with Polish- or Turkish-sounding names are evaluated worse than candidates with Swiss- or Spanish-sounding names. The effect of signaling attachment to the native and host country culture depends on the perceived distance of the cultural background. A candidate with a Spanish-sounding name who speaks the native language and acts as a chairperson in a Spanish cultural association is granted a better evaluation by employers. Regarding the Polish applicants, neither signaling attachment to the country of origin nor assimilation to the Swiss background makes a significant difference. In contrast, regarding applicants with Turkish-sounding names, signaling assimilation improves employers’ evaluation of their profile, whereas signaling attachment to the Turkish culture either by an extra curricula activity or indicating proficiency in both the Swiss and Turkish languages leads to significantly worse evaluations. We conclude that especially for individuals stemming from origins that are perceived as culturally distant, signaling attachment to the culture of origin may result in a higher occurrence of discrimination, even when the signal indicates higher human- or social-capital of the jobseeker.