Mapping the Swiss Public Administration: Challenges and First Research Steps

In the present paper, we argue that the existing data collections fail to map specific features of modern public administration in Switzerland, namely new modes of governance with hybrid state structures. After presenting the Swiss federal administration in a nutshell, we discuss the challenge of mapping hybrid state structures based on different studies focusing on four different aspects: first, quasi-state bodies; second, joined up government; third, emerging new institutions for problems not adequately captured by existing political geography, most prominently seen in the case of functional urban regions; and fourth, new modes of governance with co-production of public goods by state and non-state actors. We then present newer studies and ongoing research (which could be coupled with the mapping of public administration in Switzerland), namely the "agenda setting"-project, research on independent regulatory bodies and, finally, the courts' impact on public administration. In further conceptual work, we may discuss in more depth how the challenge of new modes of governance and cooperative government can be addressed by focusing on the transformation of state structures rather than by adopting a static view.

Treating Policy Brokers Seriously: Evidence from the Climate Policy

The advocacy coalition framework (ACF) pays special attention to "so-called” policy brokers when explaining policy change. However, this prominent policy approach neither clearly defines who the policy brokers are nor identifies under which institutional rules they have an influence on policy processes and outputs. This article thus formulates two theoretical hypotheses that complement the ACF and then proceeds to undertake the first empirical testing of these hypotheses within the Swiss climate policy (1990-2008). The empirical results show that, in the case under investigation, the strategic interest-based behavior of two policy brokers (i.e., one public administration and one political party), as well as two institutionalized veto points (i.e., optional referendum and parliamentary committee), are crucial factors explaining policy brokers' influence on policy process and chang

L’évaluation des politiques publiques entre enjeu politique et enjeu de méthode

L’évaluation des actions publiques vient en France de connaître un nouvel échec. Il est d’autant plus important, qu’il n’a pas retenu l’attention de beaucoup de commentateurs, comme si une fatalité pesait sur cette activité qui est autant valorisée dans les discours officiels, que consciencieusement évitée dans les pratiques. En adaptant une formule d’un grand spécialiste des décisions publiques Graham Allison, on peut dire que « décider sans connaître, c’est choisir les yeux bandés ». Les gouvernants français, depuis plusieurs décennies et quelle que soit leur appartenance politique, semblent tous se conformer sans faille à cet adage alarmant. Qui peut citer UN exemple d’innovation ou de réforme de l’action publique qui ait été préparé ou véritablement accompagné par une démarche évaluative ? Le suivi de la mise en place du RMI entre 1988 et 1992 demeure la belle exception qui confirme la règle. [Premier paragraphe

The media is becoming increasingly independent from politics in Switzerland

The agenda setting power of the mass media has significant influence over the political process in European countries. Anke Tresch, Pascal Sciarini and Frédéric Varone assess the relationship between the media and policy-makers’ issue attention in the four phases of the law-making process in Switzerland. They find that although the media do not always give priority to the same issues as policy-makers, when looking at the referendum phase of the law-making process, media and policy makers’ priorities are aligned. However, this strong alignment becomes weaker over time. This, they argue, is a sign of the media’s growing independence from politics

Governance of network industries: towards European regulators, differentiated regulations, or self-regulation?

This paper explores three different scenarios of how the regulatory governance of the network industries in Europe is likely to evolve, namely the emergence of European regulators, differentiated and therefore more fragmented regulation and self-regulation. This evolution it is argued, is made necessary by the fact that the current model regulatory governance of the network industries is not stable, both because the institutions and the technology are still (co-)evolving and because the currently prevailing model of independent, sector-specific national regulatory authorities is being challenged by the dynamics of the network industries, the involved firms, and most importantly by the challenges raised by deregulation be it in economic (competition is still not he norm), in political (problems with the provision of the services of general interest), and especially in technical terms (problems of interoperability, interconnection, capacity management, and system management). In its conclusion the paper confronts these three possible scenarios with the current literature on multi-level governance and concludes that future modes of regulatory governance in Europe can be identified as challenges of multi-level governance

Automatic Management of 802.11 Access Points

The automatic configuration of Access Points (APs) is a new subject, since the Wi-Fi technology, which underlies hotspots by a wireless local area network, appears on the world market in 2001. The first market relevance has been in 2002. APs channel assignment at hotspots, and more generally APs configuration and management, has to be done manually, except for very recent APs. In this paper, we intend to partially solve the problem of automatic APs management. The goal to achieve is to have an autonomous system able to perform dynamic channel allocation of WLAN APs, in the context of multiple APs in a restricted area. Moreover, the solution has to be independent from sellers (manufacturers) or owners (generally service providers). Given a set of APs located nearby each other, the problem to be solved consists in assigning a channel to each AP such that the overall throughput is maximized, or, in other words, such that the overall perturbation is minimized. Moreover, the system has to adapt himself to dynamic variations of the environment, such as the number of associated users, the usage of the APs, and so on. The solution developed in this paper uses a distributed algorithm to solve the problem. One software agent manages one AP and is able to communicate with its neighbors in order to optimize the global throughput. Tests with different topologies have been done by simulation, as well as some real implementation. These experiments have given good results, even when networks get very dense and have many APs. Comparison with optimal solution on small networks has shown that the performance of the algorithm described in this paper is very close to the optimum