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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.

The Swiss political system offers researchers in the social sciences a most fruitful context for theoretical and empirical advances in the field of digital democracy. The rich set of political institutions, characterized by a strong interplay of representative and participatory forms of democracy at different levels of the federal state, the multitude of organized political actors, a politically active citizenry, and the widespread use of Internet-based technologies throughout society have led to innovative experimentation with online instruments and processes as well as internationally relevant research. The point of departure arguably lies with Switzerland’s early attempts at introducing Internet voting in referendum votes, followed by election-targeting tools to improve the match between voters and candidates in the form of Voting Advice Applications. With the more recent proliferation of social media and the profound changes in the field of political communication, new research agendas tackle issues such as misinformation, online mobilization, campaigning, and old and new media consumption. Research on digital democracy now makes use of big data, to which constantly evolving methods of computational social sciences can be fruitfully applied. This chapter offers an overview of past and current research efforts in the areas of political communication, elections, and participatory democracy in Switzerland. It also shows how the data-rich Swiss context can inform comparative research, concluding with an outlook of opportunities and challenges that political science faces in the digital era.

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.

Chapter 1 introduces the questions this volume is going to address, the empirical approach it is going to adopt, and the three regions of Europe that are going to serve as a key structuring device in presenting the results. The volume descriptively addresses three claims that have been made in the literature on protest mobilization during the Great Recession: the existence of an internationally interconnected protest wave, the transformation of action repertoires, and the ‘return of the economy’ in the demands of protesters. Second, the volume asks about the drivers of protest mobilization, relying on three key concepts of social movement studies – grievances, resources, and political opportunity structures. More specifically, the chapters assess the role of economic and political grievances in driving protest: Do economic grievances mobilize or de-mobilize protest? They analyze the role of political parties in organizing protest in times of crisis and ask which parties take to the streets in times of crises, and they consider the role of political opportunity structures in moderating the link between economic grievances and protest. Since the distinction between the macro-regions is so important for the presentation of the results, the introduction also provides three sets of arguments why this distinction makes sense as a general grid in the analysis of the data. These three sets of arguments are linked to the same three sets of explanatory factors.pronounced whenever dire economic conditions and dissatisfaction with the political system rose together and reinforced each other.

Chapter 1 introduces the questions this volume is going to address, the empirical approach it is going to adopt, and the three regions of Europe that are going to serve as a key structuring device in presenting the results. The volume descriptively addresses three claims that have been made in the literature on protest mobilization during the Great Recession: the existence of an internationally interconnected protest wave, the transformation of action repertoires, and the ‘return of the economy’ in the demands of protesters. Second, the volume asks about the drivers of protest mobilization, relying on three key concepts of social movement studies – grievances, resources, and political opportunity structures. More specifically, the chapters assess the role of economic and political grievances in driving protest: Do economic grievances mobilize or de-mobilize protest? They analyze the role of political parties in organizing protest in times of crisis and ask which parties take to the streets in times of crises, and they consider the role of political opportunity structures in moderating the link between economic grievances and protest. Since the distinction between the macro-regions is so important for the presentation of the results, the introduction also provides three sets of arguments why this distinction makes sense as a general grid in the analysis of the data. These three sets of arguments are linked to the same three sets of explanatory factors.pronounced whenever dire economic conditions and dissatisfaction with the political system rose together and reinforced each other.

Chapter 1 introduces the questions this volume is going to address, the empirical approach it is going to adopt, and the three regions of Europe that are going to serve as a key structuring device in presenting the results. The volume descriptively addresses three claims that have been made in the literature on protest mobilization during the Great Recession: the existence of an internationally interconnected protest wave, the transformation of action repertoires, and the ‘return of the economy’ in the demands of protesters. Second, the volume asks about the drivers of protest mobilization, relying on three key concepts of social movement studies – grievances, resources, and political opportunity structures. More specifically, the chapters assess the role of economic and political grievances in driving protest: Do economic grievances mobilize or de-mobilize protest? They analyze the role of political parties in organizing protest in times of crisis and ask which parties take to the streets in times of crises, and they consider the role of political opportunity structures in moderating the link between economic grievances and protest. Since the distinction between the macro-regions is so important for the presentation of the results, the introduction also provides three sets of arguments why this distinction makes sense as a general grid in the analysis of the data. These three sets of arguments are linked to the same three sets of explanatory factors.pronounced whenever dire economic conditions and dissatisfaction with the political system rose together and reinforced each other.

Chapter 1 introduces the questions this volume is going to address, the empirical approach it is going to adopt, and the three regions of Europe that are going to serve as a key structuring device in presenting the results. The volume descriptively addresses three claims that have been made in the literature on protest mobilization during the Great Recession: the existence of an internationally interconnected protest wave, the transformation of action repertoires, and the ‘return of the economy’ in the demands of protesters. Second, the volume asks about the drivers of protest mobilization, relying on three key concepts of social movement studies – grievances, resources, and political opportunity structures. More specifically, the chapters assess the role of economic and political grievances in driving protest: Do economic grievances mobilize or de-mobilize protest? They analyze the role of political parties in organizing protest in times of crisis and ask which parties take to the streets in times of crises, and they consider the role of political opportunity structures in moderating the link between economic grievances and protest. Since the distinction between the macro-regions is so important for the presentation of the results, the introduction also provides three sets of arguments why this distinction makes sense as a general grid in the analysis of the data. These three sets of arguments are linked to the same three sets of explanatory factors.pronounced whenever dire economic conditions and dissatisfaction with the political system rose together and reinforced each other.

This chapter contains a study of diffusion among political protests in Europe. We start from a theoretical perspective that assumes protests as inherently interdependent across countries. Hence, we link geographical proximity to the likelihood of protests and we apply a spatial panel data analysis to study this link at the European, regional and cross-border level as well as for different time periods and forms of protests. The results show that spin-off movements across the continent learn from or emulate initiator movements in many instances, but that this diffusion is largely confined to the cross-border level. As a consequence, we did not find sustained protest waves that capture the majority of European countries at once. Similarly, cross-border diffusion is also only relevant for some regions and during some time periods but not universally. It seems that the grievances and opportunity structures in different European countries are varying too much in order to support widespread and long-ranging waves of protest.

Since the 1970s, the focus of contentious protest, as well as of the corresponding research, has increasingly moved from economic issues to the cultural issues associated with the new social movements. With Europe experiencing the most severe economic crisis in decades, we ask if the return of hard times has changed the distribution of contention over the different policy domains. Drawing on a dataset covering more than 30.000 protest events in thirty European countries from 2000 to 2015 and the issues and actors involved in each event, we analyse how the salience of cultural, political, and economic issues in the protest arena changes over time across countries and regions. We find evidence for a reinvigoration of economic protest particularly in southern Europe, a region that was strongly affected by the economic crisis. However, the varying crisis experiences also served to channel economic grievances into other issues: Governments deflected blame for austerity packages onto international institutions and right-wing challengers mobilized economic fears by promising more exclusive welfare benefits. Hence, the economic crisis was also addressed in political and cultural terms. Finally, we show that when the Euro-crisis ended, the migration crisis began to affect the protest arena.

The chapter establishes that economic and political grievances matter for economic protest in general and public economic protest in particular. In addition, it shows that, during the period covered, political grievances have been strongly influenced by economic grievances across Europe, but most clearly in southern Europe. While the rapid recovery of the countries of north-western Europe and the pain tolerance in the countries of central and eastern Europe probably served to limit the impact of the economic grievances on political dissatisfaction, the fact that the southern European countries not only were hard hit by the economic crisis, but also experienced a relative decline with regard to the other parts of Europe, most likely enhanced the impact of economic on political grievances in this part of Europe. Moreover, it is also above all in southern Europe that the effect of economic on political grievances was conditioned by state capacity and IMF interventions: while weak state capacity enhanced the effect of the former on the latter, IMF interventions attenuated it. Finally, a core finding of this chapter is that economic protest was most heavily influenced by the joint effect of economic and political grievances. Protest mobilization was particularly pronounced whenever dire economic conditions and dissatisfaction with the political system rose together and reinforced each other.

Chapter 1 introduces the questions this volume is going to address, the empirical approach it is going to adopt, and the three regions of Europe that are going to serve as a key structuring device in presenting the results. The volume descriptively addresses three claims that have been made in the literature on protest mobilization during the Great Recession: the existence of an internationally interconnected protest wave, the transformation of action repertoires, and the ‘return of the economy’ in the demands of protesters. Second, the volume asks about the drivers of protest mobilization, relying on three key concepts of social movement studies – grievances, resources, and political opportunity structures. More specifically, the chapters assess the role of economic and political grievances in driving protest: Do economic grievances mobilize or de-mobilize protest? They analyze the role of political parties in organizing protest in times of crisis and ask which parties take to the streets in times of crises, and they consider the role of political opportunity structures in moderating the link between economic grievances and protest. Since the distinction between the macro-regions is so important for the presentation of the results, the introduction also provides three sets of arguments why this distinction makes sense as a general grid in the analysis of the data. These three sets of arguments are linked to the same three sets of explanatory factors.pronounced whenever dire economic conditions and dissatisfaction with the political system rose together and reinforced each other.

Schweizerischer Gewerkschaftsbund, Dossier 34