Welfare state reform in times of austerity is notoriously difficult because most citizens oppose retrenchment of social benefits. Governments, thus, tend to combine cutbacks with selective benefit expansions, thereby creating trade-offs: to secure new advantages, citizens must accept painful cutbacks. Prior research has been unable to assess the effectiveness of compensating components in restrictive welfare reforms. We provide novel evidence on feasible reform strategies by applying conjoint survey analysis to a highly realistic direct democratic setting of multidimensional welfare state reform. Drawing on an original survey of Swiss citizens' attitudes toward comprehensive pension reform, we empirically demonstrate that built-in trade-offs strongly enhance the prospects of restrictive welfare reforms. Our findings indicate that agency matters: governments and policy makers can and must grant the right compensations to the relevant opposition groups to overcome institutional inertia.

Well-established methods exist for measuring party positions, but reliable means for estimating intra-party preferences remain underdeveloped. While most efforts focus on estimating the ideal points of individual legislators based on inductive scaling of roll call votes, this data suffers from two problems: selection bias due to unrecorded votes, and strong party discipline which tends to make voting a strategic rather than a sincere indication of preferences. By contrast, legislative speeches are relatively unconstrained, since party leaders are less likely to punish MPs for speaking freely as long as they vote with the party line. Yet the differences between roll call estimations and text scalings remain essentially unexplored, despite the growing application of statistical analysis of textual data to measure policy preferences. Our paper addresses this lacuna by exploiting a rich feature of the Swiss legislature: On most bills, legislators both vote and speak many times. Using this data, we compare text-based scaling of ideal points to vote-based scaling from a crucial piece of energy legislation. Our findings confirm that text scalings reveal larger intra-party differences than roll calls. Using regression models we further explain the differences between roll call and text scalings by attributing differences to constituency-level preferences for energy policy.

This study investigates the connection between legislative and electoral politics in Switzerland. We postulate that party unity is higher in the election year, and more specifically in votes on issues that are important for the party platform and that are of greater visibility to voters. We analyze the entire voting record of the Swiss parliament (lower house) on legislative acts between 1996 and 2007, which consists of roll call votes as well as unpublished votes. We find a strong effect of elections on voting unity among certain parties, and we also find encouraging support for our hypotheses that this effect is mediated by the visibility of the vote and related issue salience.

The Swiss party system has changed considerably since the 1990s. With the increasing electoral success of the right‐wing populist Swiss People's Party (SVP), the simultaneous defeat of the center‐right and a relatively stable left, it has become more polarized. In what respect have these changes in the electoral arena affected legislative politics in parliament? This article studies the voting behavior of party groups in the Swiss lower house between 1996 and 2013 in six different policy fields. The findings point to a growing level of conflict in the Swiss parliament. Overall agreement among the government parties is reduced, especially at final voting stages of the parliamentary debate. Moreover, electoral politics have become more important for the parties' behavior in parliament: in policy areas that are at the center of their party program, the SP and the SVP are less willing to move away from their original policy stance, with the consequence of increasing isolation in parliamentary votes.

In this paper we investigate prime ministers' communication strategies during the most recent economic crisis in Europe. We argue that when electoral risk is high but governments' policy options are severely limited, prime ministers will use specific communication strategies to mitigate electoral risks. We analyze two such communication strategies -issue engagement and blame shifting -by applying state-of-the-art quantitative text analysis methods on 5553 speeches of Prime Ministers in 9 EU member states. We find evidence for both strategies.Prime Ministers talk about the economy more in response to both high (domestic) unemployment and low (domestic) GDP growth. Furthermore, we find the (domestic) unemployment rate to be the most consistent predictor of blame shifting: as the domestic unemployment rate goes up, this is followed by an increase in blame shifting towards banks, Greece and the Troika.