Switzerland's Regulatory European Integration: Between Tacit Consensus and Noisy Dissensus

Abstract

Switzerland's relationship with the EU is closely related to some of the transformations of domestic politics during the last decades. This contribution analyses the development of Switzerland's legal integration measures over time and explores their correlation with indicators of domestic political change, namely party positions and the salience of European integration in the electorate. It suggests that party positions and issue salience of European integration did not prevent the rather dynamic development of Switzerland's legal integration measures for two reasons: On the one hand, parties were generally in favour of the ‘bilateral way’ and related policies and European integration lost salience over the twenty years under study. On the other hand, a considerable share of legal integration measures was conducted by the government and the federal administration following mechanisms foreseen in the sectoral agreements. These measures as well as domestic rule transpositions proved not to be related to indicators of domestic political change, whereas legal integration measures in need of approval by parliament were correlated to party positions and issue salience. The analysis builds on an empirical dataset including all sectoral agreements and all federal laws transposing EU rules in the period 1990 – 2010. The results are based on descriptive analyses and Poisson regression estimates.

National Sovereignty vs. International Cooperation: Policy Choices in Trade‐Off Situations

“…Our paper focuses on Switzerland, a country that for almost twenty years successfully walked the line between ever‐increasing economic integration with the EU and sustaining its political sovereignty. For a long time, this course was politically viable as the salience of EU integration declined in Swiss electoral politics over the course of the 2000s (Jenni ; Safi ). This low‐salience context allowed for an increasingly hybrid development: while political elites in parliament as well as citizens at the polls repeatedly confirmed bilateral treaties with the EU (and therefore, implicitly, Swiss association with the internal market), they simultaneously enacted a series of anti‐immigration reforms .…”

Anticipatory and reactive forms of blame avoidance: of foxes and lions

“…Moreover, politicians can try to reach deals behind closed doors to decrease the likelihood that a thorny issue makes it on the political agenda (Weaver, 2013). In Switzerland, for instance, where economic integration into the EU is a thorny topic, scholars have noted that international agreements increasingly happen behind closed doors and national laws and regulations are only indirectly adapted to the European context in order to avoid politicization (Jenni, 2015).…”

Political Conflict and Direct Democracy: Explaining Initiative Use 1920‐2011

“…The time between 1920 and 1930 was marked by the highest frequency of strike in Swiss history . Initiatives that touched on moral issues or were based on clashing identities, such as the role of Switzerland in Europe (see also Jenni, ), are coded as second‐dimension or cultural issues.…”