Introduction

Abstract

In the comparative politics literature, Switzerland stands alone as a country with a high level of political stability, resilient consociational and corporatist institutions, and a political culture oriented towards integration, accommodation and negotiation between actors. It is not a coincidence that Switzerland was considered a prototype of consensus by Lijphart’s (1999) influential categorization of democracies. On both the horizontal dimension (‘executive-parties’ or ‘joint-power’) and the vertical dimension (‘federal-unitary’ or ‘divided-power’) of his typology, Switzerland came closest to the ideal-type of consensus.¹ Similarly, in his famous study on small European states in world markets, Katzenstein (1984; 1985) portrayed Switzerland as the paradigmatic case of ‘liberal democratic corporatism’. He argued that the country’s economic openness and vulnerability favored the emergence of corporatist arrangements between the state, interest groups, and political parties, thus fostering consensus. Finally, Switzerland also belonged to a core group of culturally divided countries in which amicable agreements and accommodative policy-making dominated among the party elite. It was, consequently, labelled as a ‘consociational’ (Lijphart 1977; Steiner 1974), ‘negotiation’ (Lehmbruch 1996; Neidhart 1970), or ‘proportional’ (Lehmbruch 1967) democracy.