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The effective conservation and promotion of biodiversity requires its integration into a wide range of sectoral policies. For this to happen, the issue must receive attention across policy sectors. Yet, we know little about how attention to the issue evolves over time and across sectors. Drawing from the literature on environmental policy integration/mainstreaming and policy process theories, we develop competing hypotheses, expecting either increasing or fluctuating attention to the biodiversity issue. We tested the hypotheses using the case of Swiss politics between 1999 and 2018. Applying a combination of computational methods, we analyze the content of a comprehensive collection of policy documents (n ≈ 440,000) attributed to 20 policy sectors. Comparing the sectors, we find that (1) a persistent increase in attention is the exception, (2) if there is an increase in attention, it is likely to be temporary, and (3) the most common pattern is that of invariant attention over time. Biodiversity integration—if it does happen at all—tends to occur in cycles rather than in steady long-term shifts. This implies that the conservation of biodiversity does not follow the cross-sectoral nature of the problem, but is subject to the dynamics of "politics," where actors, because of limited resources, engage with (aspects of) an issue only for a certain amount of time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During most of the twentieth century, it was possible to consider Switzerland a coordinated market economy, characterized by dense interfirm networks and the strong role of business associations. Thanks to their cohesion and collective organization, in a context of quiet politics and informal institutions, business elites could largely self-regulate major socioeconomic issues in the shadow of politics. However, since the end of the twentieth century, Swiss business elites have undergone profound changes not only in their composition, but also in their coordinating capacity, their growing political divisions, and their connections to politics. This growing sociological and political fragmentation, combined with changes in the way of doing politics, through noisier and more formal politics, has weakened the instrumental power of Swiss business elites. To compensate for this loss of direct influence, business elites of the largest Swiss companies have developed new political strategies, relying on their growing structural power in a context of global and financial capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Swiss Political Science Review is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Swiss Political Science Review is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Swiss Political Science Review is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Swiss Political Science Review is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Swiss Political Science Review is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The Cold War constituted a major challenge for small neutral states forced to justify their political positioning. Neutrality, criticized or misunderstood, became a major issue for diplomats. Comparing the case of Switzerland with that of Sweden, Finland and Austria shows the immediate post-war period to be a key moment during which the original mechanisms of public diplomacy to justify their neutrality were developed. Presented as a political weapon, neutrality was also integrated within discourse on national identity. There are enough similarities with regard to public diplomacy in these small neutral states to identify a model that is specific to them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Policy scholars typically assume that implementing actors should follow democratically decided rules in linear, predictable ways. However, this assumption does not factor in the operational challenges and multiple accountability relations facing policy implementers in contemporary, hybrid policy implementation settings. Shifting the focus to throughput (governance process) and output legitimacy (results), this paper explores how throughput dimensions affect the implementation of policy outputs. We study a hybrid policy—the Swiss Forest Policy 2020—in a federalist, multi-level implementation context. We find that accountability dilemmas have negative consequences for output implementation, particularly when professionalism clashes with rules. Accountability dilemmas are exacerbated by policy incoherence and interact with policy ambiguity. However, high issue salience can partially compensate for the negative effects of these factors. In sum, we highlight how the role of implementing actors in democratic countries goes beyond rule-following: accountability relations and other throughput dimensions crucially affect output legitimacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The question how voter preferences relate to preferences of representatives under different electoral rules has attracted scholarly attention for some time. Although theoretical work suggests that proportional rule leads to more dispersion of representatives than plurality rule, empirical studies of this nexus have not yet reached a consensus. We argue that this is because they are plagued by serious problems as they rely on measures that differ for both sets of actors. We use behavioral data to estimate ideal points of voters and representatives on a common scale by taking advantage of the high frequency of referendums in Switzerland. We find that members of parliament elected in proportional representation systems are more widely dispersed around the median voter. Probing at what stage this difference in dispersion occurs, we also demonstrate this is the voters' doing, as it only applies to candidates who are elected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper adds insights to the ongoing discussion about how the political participation gap between naturalised immigrants and native citizens can be closed. In contrast to prior research, however, it takes a new turn by looking at the moderating role of national attachments, namely national identity and patriotism, in the relationship between immigration background and political involvement. The research question is explored based on the paradigmatic case of Switzerland with its high levels of foreign born citizens and the historically strong identification as a political nation. Based on the results we can say that national attachments are indeed able to bridge the participation gap. The effect of patriotism – the evaluative dimension of national attachment – thereby plays a more important role for immigrants than simple national identification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In urban spaces, racial profiling is a widespread police practice that dramatically reveals who is not considered a citizen of the nation. As the so-called majority society tends to see racial profiling as an indispensable police measure to maintain 'order' and 'security', initiatives of solidarity with people experiencing this form of institutional racism are rare. Nevertheless, a movement against racial profiling has emerged in Switzerland since 2016, protecting People of Color against local border policing and challenging the racialized boundaries of national citizenship. To analyze the convergence of differing solidarity practices, I propose the concept of 'infrastructure of solidarity'. As I show in the empirical analysis, this 'infrastructure of solidarity' contesting racial profiling consists of a diverse set of actors deploying various forms of (counter-)knowledge and different political, social and spatial registers: from being involved in direct actions within urban citizenship struggles to artistic interventions and activist research to highly professional strategic litigation; and from solidarity as intimate, friendship-based care relationships to more strategic political relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research note presents three newly interconnected and expanded datasets on interest groups' (IGs) access to the Swiss political decision‐making process: (1) extra‐parliamentary committee seats occupied by IGs (1980, 2000, 2010), (2) parliamentary (committee) seats occupied by IG representatives (1992‐2015), and (3) consultation replies submitted by IGs (2008‐11). We show that the Swiss system of interest intermediation adapted to the multiplication and organizational consolidation of citizen groups, which defend non‐producer interests and do not provide selective benefits to their members (e.g. environmental groups). The share of access granted to citizen groups has increased in both the administration and parliament, across all federal departments and most legislative committees. Moreover, citizen groups benefit from a larger share of access in the recently revitalized parliament, compared to the administration. This suggests that economic groups' decline in power is also related to the rise of citizen groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Members of parliament are key actors for the implementation of energy transitions, such as phasing out nuclear power. Before legislators can cast their maybe decisive vote in parliament, they need to run for office and actively strive for election. This paper assesses what political candidates oppose renewable energy transitions and questions whether the energy issue matters in national elections, and thus has consequences for the implementation of new sustainable energy sources. We analyze these questions by first describing the specific characteristics of political candidates. The paper then evaluates the relevance of the energy issue for electoral success in three national elections in Switzerland (2007, 2012, and 2015). Based on candidate data from the voting advice application smartvote.ch, we find that female candidates support ETs more than men do; that especially the French‐speaking part of the country is more in favor of a nuclear phase‐out, and that younger candidates are also more open toward restructuring the energy system than older candidates are. Our models further show that the energy issue does not matter in elections, independently from its salience in the respective election campaigns. Candidates are thus relatively free to choose their position on the issue and do not have to fear consequences at the ballot. However, candidates of center parties, in contrast to the pole parties, are sensitive to the energy issue and reflect public mood in their positions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines success of the green parties in Swiss federal elections of October 20, 2019. It reports the Green Party (GPS) won 13.2 percent and the Green Liberal Party (GLP) 7.8 percent of the votes, and two green forces together thus secured more than one fifth of the votes for the National Council, Switzerland's lower house of Parliament. It mentions although neither party was able to achieve representation in the government, their success has shaken the foundations of Swiss party politics and, if repeated, may see them enter government.

The article analyzes how government regulations in the U.S., Switzerland, and the European Union (EU) sift various levels of anonymization of electronic medical records (EHR), in addition to how those levels equate with technological innovations.

At the beginning of the 1980s, global aftermath studies prompted new perceptions of a nuclear war's long-term effects on Planet Earth. Focusing on the Swiss 'Weiterleben' ('to live on') study, which translated these findings into a local context, the paper sheds light on the intertwined history of global politics, science, national security debates, and nuclear fear. It reveals important socio-political and epistemic shifts in the 1980s. Even in countries with comprehensive civil defence systems like Switzerland, the idea that a nuclear war was manageable came to an end; new forms of planning and types of scientific reasoning evolved that superseded 'Cold War rationality'; and, finally, emotions became a crucial political factor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For all their differences, both Austria and Switzerland have long been considered to represent key examples of consociational democracy. Since the 1990s, both countries have however faced major challenges to their respective consociationalist regimes. One of the shared features of regime evolution and change in Austria and Switzerland, which can be meaningfully referred to as 'de‐consociationalisation', concerns the successful exploitation of external shocks by powerful populist parties. Taking stock of the developments in four different areas (the electoral, the parliamentary and the executive arena as well as interest group/state relations), we identify a complex dynamic which has made the two countries more similar in some respects, but more different in others. Overall, two decades into the twenty‐first century, Austria is significantly less of a consociationalist regime than Switzerland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper builds upon the concept of "coalescent elite behaviour" which is crucial in consociational theory, but contested regarding its actual conceptualization. Contrary to Lijphart's (1968) original assumption that elites are generally committed to an "overarching cooperation", we hypothesize that institutional venues must be taken in account. Thus, the aim of this paper is twofold: Conceptually, we try to clarify the nature of "amicable agreement" regarding two core institutions (i.e. parliament, government), and regarding executive‐legislative relations. Empirically, we follow a two‐step empirical approach that combines a cross‐time comparison of the decision‐making process regarding the revision of the Swiss basic pension scheme (AHV) with a cross‐case assessment following Fischer's two‐dimensional typology. More generally, our findings serve to inductively refine the "political side" of consociationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What determines the failure of local government amalgamation referenda? Existing research suggests that functional pressures act as a push factor towards local territorial reform, whereas considerations of political self-determination exert a pull effect. However, we know little about the respective importance of these countervailing forces. In this paper, I analyze popular vote decisions on mergers of 541 municipalities involved in 166 different merger projects in three Swiss cantons since the new millennium. The results show that both functional pressures and concerns for self-determination are linked to popular vote outcomes: small municipalities are less likely to reject a merger. Concerns for self-determination matter, but only when the pressures of smallness are not overwhelming: a higher vote share of right-wing parties and a preponderance of other municipalities in the merger coalition increase the probability that voters reject a merger project. This has implications for policy-makers' strategies when drafting and promoting voluntary local amalgamation reforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although mainstream historiography's postcolonial indifference has been heavily contested, a profound engagement with how race relates to racism in Switzerland seems far-off. As the country's direct democratic system relentlessly allows for race to be mobilized, Swiss racial denial results in an inability to productively name and contest racism. This would be particularly pertinent, as racism has not only been normalized by right-wing popular initiatives but also by a state-sponsored climate in which any attempt of naming racism is deemed excessive or hysterical. This article explores the effects of anti-racialist 'anti-racism' on public debates about racism in Switzerland. It has been argued that, in wake of the UNESCO consensus, anti-racialism has been established as the dominant paradigm of anti-racism across Europe. Through an analysis of Swiss state anti-racism, I will propose that an unexamined commitment to the anti-racialist tradition actively contributes to the difficulty of naming and combating racism in Switzerland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do minorities fare worse under direct democracy than under representative democracy? We provide new evidence by studying naturalization requests of immigrants in Switzerland that were typically decided with referendums in each municipality. Using panel data from about 1,400 municipalities for the 1991–2009 period, we exploit Federal Court rulings that forced municipalities to transfer the decisions to their elected municipality councils. We find that naturalization rates surged by about 60% once politicians rather than citizens began deciding on naturalization applications. Whereas voters in referendums face no cost of arbitrarily rejecting qualified applicants based on discriminatory preferences, politicians in the council are constrained to formally justify rejections and may be held accountable by judicial review. Consistent with this mechanism, the increase in naturalization rates caused by switching from direct to representative democracy is much stronger for more marginalized immigrant groups and in areas where voters are more xenophobic or where judicial review is more salient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The founding generation made extensive use of history in the framing of the American republic. The Swiss confederation did not figure as prominently in American thought as ancient and English history, but it does illustrate how American statesmen used history in political arguments. John Adams saw the histories of the individual Swiss cantons as proof that every society, no matter how simple, needed a balanced government to preserve liberty. For the Federalists, the Swiss, along with all other loose confederacies, demonstrated the inadequacy of a league of friendship, as provided by the Articles of Confederation, and the need for a stronger union. The Anti-Federalists made great use of Swiss history in two particulars. First, they saw the Swiss as a successful confederacy, pointing to its survival rather than its instability. The Swiss demonstrated there was no need for a stronger union. Furthermore, the Anti-Federalists believed the Swiss proved that a nation could survive in the midst of hostile nations without recourse to a standing army. The Framers' use of Swiss history demonstrated how their reading of history was shaped by their political agendas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Moderne Staat is the property of Verlag Barbara Budrich GmbH and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In elections, voters sometimes compensate for post‐election bargaining processes by electing parties that are more extreme than themselves. We investigate compensatory voting in direct democracy. Our goals are to develop and test a measure of compensatory voting in direct legislation and assess its extent of compensatory voting. Empirically, we draw on the case of Switzerland, a country with frequent popular votes. We operationalize compensatory voting as voting 'yes' on a popular initiative in spite of endorsing arguments that speak against this initiative, under the condition of being well‐informed about the initiative. Using data from post‐ballot surveys on 17'570 individuals having voted on 63 popular initiatives in the period 1993 to 2015, our analysis shows that compensatory voting has not significantly increased in Switzerland in this period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Government reforms such as contracting-out continue to influence public service provision within infrastructure sectors. Contracting-out involves a detachment of the operators from political decision-making and the creation of intermediary procurement agencies. These reforms therefore tend to require an adaptation of how accountability is implemented. Previously, elected officials delegated their democratic authority (vested in them through public votes) to the public administration and thus more or less controlled service delivery. We address how accountability has been adapted in the context of contracting-out and the challenges that have emerged. We are primarily interested in assessing the ability of the political body to maintain control and the relationship between private service providers, citizens and customers. Using a multiple case study design, we select cases from the public transport sectors at the regional level in Sweden, Norway and Switzerland that represent different contracting-out models. We find that with increasing degrees of autonomy from the state (the two Nordic cases) there are both more adaptations to accountability and also more challenges emerge than the model with direct political control (the Swiss case). The central challenges arise between politicaladministrative and agency accountability with the involvement of a procurement agency. This has led to reforms to re-integrate the intermediary procurement agencies back into the country administration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract A well-established body of literature links voter turnout to political campaigns. In this view, intensive campaigns increase the perceived salience of a decision, fostering information-seeking and, ultimately, turnout. The existing literature has also advanced our understanding of how direct democratic institutions influence turnout in elections. Yet we still know little about whether and to what extent campaign efforts influence voter turnout in direct democratic votes, and we know even less about who is mobilized. We claim that campaign intensity has differentiated effects across voters, depending on voters' participation profile. To test this claim we use a rich dataset of official turnout data covering more than 40 direct democratic votes in Switzerland. The results support our claim. While intensive political campaigns overall foster citizens to turn out to vote, they do so especially for "selective" (or "intermittent") voters, who need to decide anew at each ballot whether to turn out or not. Interestingly, we also find that frequent abstainers are not immune from campaign effects, and get almost as strongly mobilized as selective voters in highly intensive campaigns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Politicians, parties and interest groups are strongly interlinked in Switzerland. Most studies focus on the interest group influence during parliamentary legislative processes. This article fills a gap by focusing on a question that was largely ignored so far: the impact of interest group support on electoral success of candidates. We collected information on the magnitude and nature of self‐reported relations between individual candidates and many interest groups in the 2015 Swiss national election. This new and unique data set allows us to explore the varying impact of specific interest group types on candidates electoral success. Being endorsed by many interest group and occupying leading positions are positively correlated with larger shares of preference votes, while financial contribution show no significant impact. There is, however, variation how endorsements by and leading positions at interest group matter for candidates from different parties depending on the type of interest group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article studies the heterogeneity of cantonal SVP branches in terms of populism and relates it to individual populist attitudes around the 2015 National Council elections. Quantitative text analysis of party manifestos delivers measures of populism for 24 cantonal branches of the SVP. These estimates are related to individual‐level 2015 Selects survey data. The results indicate that there is still a variety of populism between the different cantonal branches of the SVP, even after the split into two parties (BDP and SVP). Evidence for general correspondence between contextual populism (supply side) and individual‐level populist attitudes (demand side) is limited, but some patterns related to the existence of the BDP emerge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In light of the increased volatility in party preference and alleged importance of issue voting, the scarce knowledge about how short‐term stability and change in issue ownership perceptions influence stability and change of party choice is puzzling. This paper fills a gap by examining whether and to what extent the three pathways of electoral choice formation (activation, conversion and reinforcement) occur in line with the dynamics of issue competence evaluations. Our analysis of panel data from the 2015 Swiss election study shows that the stability and change in issue ownership perceptions is highly consequential. Citizens who change or maintain their competence attribution in favor of a party during the electoral campaign are more likely to activate, convert or reinforce their vote for that party. The results regarding the conditional effects of issue salience are more mixed, but not less interesting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

So far, populism has mainly been studied by looking at the political supply side. This contribution focuses on the political demand side by explaining citizens' levels of support for populist attitudes. We formulate two competing hypotheses. The first hypothesis expects populist attitudes to be most pervasive on the ideological extremes, while the second one posits that individuals are more likely to hold these attitudes the more to the right of the political spectrum they position themselves. Our empirical analysis of a representative survey of the Swiss Electoral Study (SELECTS) supports the second hypothesis. We argue that this right‐sided orientation among Swiss citizens can be attributed to context characteristics that are currently available in the northern part of Western Europe (i.e. the absence of a long‐lasting economic crisis, the high saliency of identity politics, and a strong populist mobilization by the radical right). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While negative campaigning has received increased attention, scholars have mostly focused on its effects. Studies looking at the determinants of negative campaigning remain sparse. Our article contributes to literature by developing a two-level model that takes into account the strategic choices of political actors and their characteristics as well as the context in which the negative strategy takes place. We apply our model to a rich data set of newspaper ads regarding direct democratic votes held in Switzerland. Our results show that negative campaigning, as measured by personal attacks, is more likely if political actors defend the status quo or are lagging behind in the polls, if the ad stems from a populist right party or entails no explicit endorsement, or if the ballot day draws near. Popular initiatives and more intense campaigns also generate a higher share of negative campaigning. Overall, then, a number of causal factors identified in (U.S.) elections also matter in Swiss direct democracy, which suggests that the reasons that make political actors willing to "go negative" are of broad relevance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the programmatic and institutional reform of the national security field in Switzerland. Also cited are the principles of armed neutrality and autonomous defense as the basis in the creation of the field by the Swiss Defense Ministry, the direct effect of the field to the everyday life of Swiss residents, as well as the expansion of the field's purpose to include integrated peace-building, integrated border management, and transnational organized crime prevention.

In the United States, mass shootings are commonplace and public reaction is clockwork: the shooting occurs, pro-control activists demand gun regulation, anti-control proponents balk against further regulation, and eventually, the incident is long forgotten. American politicians and policy-makers have thus become professionals at riding out the waves of gun violence. The question begging an answer is: why? Why are Americans unsuccessful at effective gun regulation? The answer to this question rests upon cultural cognition and how Americans perceive gun risk. This paper compares and contrasts American history and its gun policies with Switzerland, a nation well-versed in gun ownership and regulation and from this comparison, concludes that, what distinguishes Switzerland and America is how people perceive guns, what they symbolize for different cultural groups, and how legislators differ in their respective law-making strategies. From this discussion, a solution is proposed. This solution centers upon cultural diversity, espousing non-threatening law to varied cultural groups, and proposing self-affirming policies to the public. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate to what extent the initiatives of local governments to launch modernisation processes are facilitated by local autonomy, which is increasingly important in both the theory and practice of public policy and management.Design/methodology/approach Local government reforms are distinguished according to the institutional structure at which they are directed and local autonomy is assessed as a multidimensional concept. Drawing on a multilevel analysis of the Swiss case, this paper combines data stemming from a survey conducted at the local tier with secondary data from the regional tier.Findings The main empirical findings are threefold. First, when local governments undertake managerial or political reform initiatives, their autonomy with respect to higher levels of government matters. Second, it is not local autonomy but rather the perception of structural problems that is the force driving territorial reforms. Third, it is not the autonomy enjoyed by local governments vis-à-vis local factors, but rather the pressures stemming from that context that may lead to reforms.Originality/value By adopting a comparative approach to local autonomy, this paper shows that local governments which have sufficient latitude for local policy making are likely to take initiatives to improve service delivery in accordance with local preferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we examine the association between contact with migrant populations and support for the populist radical right (PRR) in Switzerland. Building on group threat and intergroup contact theories, which offer opposing predictions, and drawing on Appadurai's thesis of the 'fear of small numbers', we propose a new theoretical framework to explain this association. We predict that the relationship between the size of the migrant populations and PRR voting is nonlinear: a small but noticeable minority triggers the formation of anti-immigrant attitudes, which soften as the minority grows and people start having meaningful interactions with foreigners. To test these theories, we combine individual-level data with municipality-level information. Mixedeffects multilevel models confirm that individuals in municipalities with a moderate proportion of foreigners are more likely than those with fewer or a greater number of migrants to cast their vote in support of PRR parties; this is particularly so for certain stigmatised minorities. We further explore the effect of perceived immigrant threat in moderating these relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]