Competitive Consensus. What comes after Consociationalism in Switzerland?

Abstract

Large coalition governments, including all relevant parties, are at the heart of the consociational model of Swiss democracy. Until the 1990s, this model was characterised as "voluntary proportional". It was based on a stable cooperation of two main blocs of political parties, and on elite-driven agreements on all-inclusive government formulas. Despite growing competition in governmental elections, all-party coalitions have survived in most cantons. This article explains that the political minority could keep and even improve its representation, as a consequence of the divisions in the political majority. While right-wing parties hold the majority in almost all Swiss cantons and at the federal level, they are no longer sufficiently cohesive to control the elections. As a consequence, elections have become more uncertain, and political minorities can capitalise on this in order to win seats. Empirically, this paper investigates elections for Swiss cantonal governments in the period 1971-2011. It combines data on the unity of political blocs with data on government formation. To measure the political unity of the blocs, the paper introduces a novel measure based on the voting recommendations issued by cantonal parties on the occasion of national referendums.

The New Cultural Conflict, Polarization, and Representation in the Swiss Party System, 1975–2011

“…And the inclusion of all relevant parties and interest groups into the policy‐making process no longer insulate the resulting compromises from referendums, as Neidhart () had postulated. Likewise, Bochsler and Bousbah () show that polarization undermines the unity of the right and thereby impacts on government formation, while Afonso and Papadopoulos () demonstrate that the rise of the SVP has affected policy outcomes by redrawing welfare state reform coalitions.…”

The Democratic Effect of Direct Democracy

“…We include measures of the electoral threshold and the power of the legislator vis-à-vis the government, expecting that low electoral thresholds and powerful legislators are associated with higher policy congruence (Kaiss, 2010;Bochsler and Bousbah, 2015). Furthermore, we control for economic, cultural, political, and structural heterogeneity among the cantons by modeling GDP per capita, population size, the strength of the Swiss People's Party (SVP), and the share of German speaking citizens.…”

The 2015 National Elections in Switzerland: Renewed Polarization and Shift to the Right

“…In the last decades, the SP could profit from increasing divergences within the centre-right: in most cantons, parties of the centre-right no longer present a united front, making it easier for the Social Democrats to capture seats even in cantons where the left is a clear minority. Instead, the SVP does hard in converting its voting potential into mandates under majoritarian election rules (Bochsler & Bousbah, 2015). As after the elections 2011, the SVP sends 5 representatives to the Council of States.…”