Policy positions are used extensively to explain coalition formation, advocacy success and policy outputs, and government consultations and stakeholder surveys are seen as important means of gathering data about policy actors’ positions. However, we know little about how accurately official consultations and stakeholder surveys reflect their views. This study compares advocacy organisations’ publicly stated positions in their responses to official consultations with their positions expressed in confidential surveys conducted by the authors. It compares three decision-making processes in Switzerland ‐ in energy, climate and water protection ‐ to analyse responses via two different types of data gathering methods. The results show a substantial divergence between official and private expressions of policy positions. Specific types of policy actors (losers), instruments (persuasive measures) and subsystems (collaborative network) produce more divergent positions. This has important methodological implications for comparative policy studies that use different data gathering methods and focus on different policy domains.

This article explores the factors that hinder and promote the deployment of renewable energy generating infrastructure in/across the Swiss cantons (i.e. the country's federal units). Using the example of small-scale hydropower, we shed light on how political regulations at the cantonal level interact with national policies and the local political process to affect the deployment of renewable energy production. The analysis demonstrates that political regulations can both foster and hinder the deployment of renewable energy production. While the national feed-in tariff scheme is revealed to be a beneficial framework condition, cantonal regulations hamper, rather than facilitate, the deployment of small-scale hydropower. Moreover, inclusive local processes and the existence of local entrepreneurs seem to act as a trigger for the local acceptance of renewable energy generation infrastructure. More generally, we conclude that, quite independently of whether state structures are decentralized or centralized, subnational and local leeway in the definition and organization of projects can help to prevent or deal with local opposition.