Estimating intra-party preferences: comparing speeches tovotes

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

The politics of trade-offs: studying the dynamics of welfare state reform with conjoint experiments

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

The surge in women's representation in the 2019 Swiss federal elections

In the 2019 Swiss federal elections, women's representation increased more than at any time before, reaching an all-time high at 42%. In this article, we offer several explanations for this. First, in almost all parties, the percentage of female candidates was significantly larger than in the previous elections. Second, on average female candidates held better positions on party lists, both compared to men and to the previous election. Third, in 2019 (but not in 2015) women were about one percentage-point more likely to be elected than men, controlling for many relevant factors. Fourth, about one third of the surge was linked to the fact that parties that won seats in 2019 (the Greens, especially) had more women on their lists compared to the parties that lost seats. Fifth, in 2019 voters (women in particular) perceived female candidates as more fit for a political office compared to 2015

Disenchanted Swiss parliament? Electoral strategies and coalition formation

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

Rebels without a clue: Internet exposure and political behavior in Switzerland

This contribution gauges the implication of the Internet's development from a niche to a mass communication technology for political behavior in Switzerland. Our theoretical framework allows to understand the conflicting effects of Internet exposure on polarization, political knowledge, trust in government, and interest in politics found by previous studies. Drawing on data from the Voxit surveys of popular votes from 2000 to 2010 as well as the Swiss Household Panel from 2000 to 2009, we show that the net effect of Internet exposure means increasing political polarization, less individual trust in government, more motivation for politics, and invariant political sophistication. This evidence leads to an overall ambivalent assessment regarding the role of the Internet for the disengagement or mobilization among Swiss citizens. The results are more robust compared to extant studies, since selection models and panel analysis are applied to control for sample bias and to isolate causal effects. Furthermore, only Internet exposure which directly relates to politics is considered, exposure to other potentially influential media is controlled for and an extensive time period is studied

Consensus democracy: legislative decision-making in Switzerland

This dissertation is guided by two main research questions: First, how does consensus democracy in Switzerland work in the 21th century? and second, how do the recent changes in the Swiss party system affect legislative politics in Switzerland? The first part of the thesis tests an important claim that participation in policy making should increase satisfaction with the policy outcome. We study the interest groups that participate in policy making processes, their assessment of the degree of consensus and satisfaction with policy outcomes. The second part of the thesis studies different aspects of legislative behaviour in the recent legislative periods (1996 – 2011): the parties' voting coalitions and success in parliament, the parties' voting unity and their policy positions. These three articles are interested in whether and how legislative politics has changed after the recent polarisation of the Swiss party system. Overall, the results of this dissertation indicate that Swiss consensus democracy still works reasonably well at the beginning of the 21th century

Coalition Formation in Parliament and during the Policy Process

In modern democratic systems, usually no single collective actor is able to decisively influence political decision-making. Instead, actors with similar preferences form coalitions in order to gain more influence in the policy process. In the Swiss political system in particular, institutional veto points and the consensual culture of policy-making provide strong incentives for actors to form large coalitions. Coalitions are thus especially important in political decision-making in Switzerland, and are accordingly a central focus of this book. According to one of our core claims - to understand the actual functioning of Swiss consensus democracy - one needs to extend the analysis beyond formal institutions to also include informal procedures and practices. Coalitions of actors play a crucial role in this respect. They are a cornerstone of decision-making structures, and they inform us about patterns of conflict, collaboration and power among actors. Looking at coalitions is all the more interesting in the Swiss political system, since the coalition structure is supposed to vary across policy processes. Given the absence of a fixed government coalition, actors need to form new coalitions in each policy process