Landwirtschaft

Das Parlament begann im Herbst mit den Beratungen über die Agrarpolitik 2014-2017. – Das Referendum gegen das revidierte Tierseuchengesetz scheiterte an der Urne. – Die Turbulenzen um den kürzlich liberalisierten Milchmarkt beschäftigten die Branchenvertreter und das Parlament. – Sowohl das revidierte Tierschutzgesetz als auch das Bundesgesetz über den Verkehr mit Tieren und Pflanzen geschützter Arten wurden vom Parlament angenommen. – Eine Volksinitiative zum Schutz von Grossraubtieren wie Luchs, Bär und Wolf wurde bei der Staatskanzlei eingereicht.

Boden- und Wohnwirtschaft

Mit dem Raumkonzept Schweiz wurde das erste tripartite Konzept zur Förderung der nachhaltigen Raumentwicklung verabschiedet. – Gegen die beschlossene Teilrevision des Raumplanungsgesetzes, welche der Landschaftsinitiative als indirekter Gegenvorschlag gegenübergestellt worden war, ergriff der Schweizerische Gewerbeverband erfolgreich das Referendum. – Mit einem hauchdünnen Mehr nahmen Volk und Stände die Volksinitiative „Schluss mit dem uferlosen Bau von Zweitwohnungen“ überraschend an. Der Bundesrat erarbeitete sogleich eine Übergangsverordnung, welche per 1.1.13 in Kraft tritt. – Mit der Ablehnung dreier Volksinitiativen sprachen sich die Stimmbürgerinnen und Stimmbürger gegen eine verstärkte Wohneigentumsförderung aus.

Argumentation et interaction dans les brochures du Conseil fédéral suisse sur les votations populaires

Lors des votations populaires en Suisse, le Conseil fédéral fait connaître la position gouvernementale à l’aide de brochures envoyées à tous les citoyens. Celles-ci mettent en jeu une corrélation étroite entre argumentation et interaction, tant sur le plan interdiscursif qu’interlocutif. L’objectif de cet article est de montrer, à partir de brochures représentatives, comment une telle corrélation varie fortement selon les stratégies adoptées par le Conseil fédéral. Ainsi, dans les brochures proposant un projet de référendum, on remarque une interaction limitée, en raison de leur argumentation rationnelle et de leur tendance à se fermer sur le point de vue du Conseil fédéral. Par contre, dans les brochures soutenant ou rejetant des initiatives populaires, on observe une montée au premier plan des procédures interactives. Celles-ci peuvent être convergentes ou divergentes, en liaison avec différentes stratégies argumentatives qui vont de la surenchère à la polémique. Au total, ces brochures gouvernementales nous confirment que l’analyse du discours politique gagne à être repensée à l’aide des modèles dits « dialogaux » (Plantin 2005) de l’argumentation.

Twenty-three per cent of the Swiss adult population are using complementary medicine

Aim of the study Various forms of complementary medicine (CM) play an important role in the Swiss health care system, they are appreciated by a majority of the population and mostly used complementarily rather than alternatively to conventional medicine. This study investigates, how many people in Switzerland are actually being treated with CM, and what the most popular methods of CM are. Data Data of the Swiss Health Survey 2007 were obtained from the Swiss Federal Statistical Office. This survey is performed every 5 years amongst a sample of the Swiss resident population above 15 years of age. It consists of a telephone interview followed by a written questionnaire (2007: 18'760 and 14'432 respondents, respectively) and includes questions about people's state of health, general living conditions, lifestyle, health insurance and usage of health services. Results 23.0% of the Swiss adult population (women: 30.5%, men: 15.2%) used CM during the 12 months before the survey. Homeopathy (6.4%), osteopathy (5.4%) and acupuncture (4.9%) were the most popular methods. The average number of treatments within 12 months for these three methods was 3.1, 3.5 and 6.6, respectively. For treatments with homeopathy and acupuncture, medical practitioners were more commonly consulted than non-medical practitioners, for treatments with osteopathy no difference was found. By means of logistic regression, CM users and non-users were compared. There were significant differences in the use of CM between genders, age groups, levels of education and areas of living. Women, people aged 25 to 64 years, and people with higher education used CM more commonly than men, people below 25 or above 64 years of age, or those with poorer education. Lake Geneva region and central Switzerland had a higher proportion of CM users than the other regions. Discussion While 2 years ago, 67.0% of the Swiss population approved a referendum in favour of CM, we find that 23.0% are in fact using it. Current political discussions focus on effectiveness, cost effectiveness and suitability of CM to decide which methods should be permanently covered by the basic health insurance.

The Politics of Local Autonomy: Measuring Cantonal (De)Centralisation in Switzerland

In Switzerland, there are 26 systems of cantonal decentralisation because regulating municipal autonomy is an exclusively cantonal competency. Existing measures of local autonomy/cantonal decentralisation are confined to measuring the real or perceived distribution of functions. Alternatively, they weigh expenditures (Dafflon 1992) or tax revenues (Dlabac and Schaub forthcoming) of municipalities against those of the canton. Complementing these indices, this paper additionally measures the politics dimension of cantonal decentralisation. Seven aspects are measured: intra-cantonal regionalism, cumuldesmandats (double tenure of cantonal MP and mayoral office), territorial quotas for legislative and executive elections, direct local representation and lobbying, party decentralisation, the number and size of constituencies, and direct democracy (communal referendum and initiative). This results in a ranking of all 26 cantons as regards the politics of local autonomy within their political systems. The measure will help scholars to test assumptions held for decentralisation in general, be it as a dependent (explaining decentralisation) or as an independent variable (decentralisation—so what?), within but also beyond the Swiss context.

Moral Politics: The Religious Factor in Referenda Voting

This article combines the research strands of moral politics and political behavior by focusing on the effect of individual and contextual religiosity on individual vote decisions in popular initiatives and public referenda concerning morally charged issues. We rely on a total of 13 surveys with 1,000 respondents each conducted after every referendum on moral policies in Switzerland between 1992 and 2012. Results based on cross-classified multilevel models show that religious behaving instead of nominal religious belonging plays a crucial role in decision making on moral issues. This supports the idea that the traditional confessional cleavage is replaced by a new religious cleavage that divides the religious from the secular. This newer cleavage is characterized by party alignments that extend from electoral to direct democratic voting behavior. Overall, our study lends support to previous findings drawn from American research on moral politics, direct democracies, and the public role of religion.

“Crye Fredome”? Medievalism and Twenty-First-Century Scottish National Identity

It is a well-documented fact that the Middle Ages have had a long history of instrumentalisation by nationalisms. 19th-century Eu¬rope in particular witnessed an origins craze during the process of nation-building. In the post-Shoah, post-modern West, on the other hand, we might expect this kind of medievalist master nar¬rative to have been consigned to the dustbin of history. And yet, as nationalism surges again in Europe, negotiations of national identi¬ties in medieval dress seem to have become fashionable once more. In order to come to terms with the fragmented and often contradictory presence of the Middle Ages in these discourses of national identity, I propose we consider medievalism a utilitarian product of the cultural memory. Rather than representing any ‘real’ Middle Ages, then, medievalism tailors available knowledge of the medieval past to the diverse social needs and ideologies of the present. This paper looks at a selection of Scottish examples of present-day medievalism in an attempt to investigate, in particular, the place of the medieval Wars of Scottish Independence in contemporary negotiations of ‘Scottishness’. Both the relationships envisioned between self and other and the role played by ‘the land’ in these cultural, social and political instances of national introspection offer starting points for critical inquiry. Moreover, the analysis of a scholarly intervention in the run-up to the 2014 Scottish independence referendum indicates an intriguing dialogue of academic and non-academic voices in the context of Scottish medievalist cultural memory. We thus find a wide array of uses of the Scottish Middle Ages, some of which feed into the burgeoning nationalism of recent years, while others offer more pensive and ambivalent answers to the question of what it means to be Scottish in the 21st century.

Cultural Legacies and Political Preferences: The Failure of Separatism in the Swiss Jura

The study of secession generally stresses the causal influence of cultural identities, political preferences, or ecological factors. Whereas these different views are often considered to be mutually exclusive, this paper proposes a two-stage model in which they are complementary. We posit that cultural identities matter for explaining secessionism, but not because of primordial attachments. Rather, religious and linguistic groups matter because their members are imbued with cultural legacies that lead to distinct political preferences – in this case preferences over welfare statism. Further, ecological constraints such as geography and topography affect social interaction with like-minded individuals. On the basis of both these political preferences and ecological constraints, individuals then make rational choices about the desirability of secession. Instrumental considerations are therefore crucial in explaining the decision to secede, but not in a conventional pocketbook manner. To examine this theory, we analyze the 2013 referendum on the secession of the Jura Bernois region from the Canton of Berne in Switzerland, using municipal level census and referendum data. The results lend support to the theory and suggest one way in which the politics of identity, based on factors like language and religion, can be fused with the politics of interest (preferences for more or less state intervention into the polity and economy) to better understand group behavior.

Verkehr und Kommunikation

Die Vorlage zu Finanzierung und Ausbau der Bahninfrastruktur (FABI) wurde in der Volksabstimmung angenommen. - Die «Milchkuh-Initiative» kam zustande. - Beide Parlamentskammern sprachen sich für den Bau einer zweiten Gotthardröhre aus, das Referendum dagegen wurde ergriffen. - Das Parlament beschloss, den Zahlungsrahmen für die Förderung des alpenquerenden Schienengüterverkehrs um fünf Jahre zu verlängern. - Der Streit zwischen Frankreich und der Schweiz um die Besteuerung des Schweizer Sektors im Euroairport Basel-Mulhouse ging in eine neue Runde. - Die Swiss sah sich einer verschärften Konkurrenz ausgesetzt.

Medien

Aufgrund noch ungewissen Ausgangs des tiefgreifenden Strukturwandels in der Medienlandschaft plädierte der Bundesrat in seinem Bericht zur Sicherung der staats- und demokratiepolitischen Funktionen der Medien, keine überstürzten Massnahmen zu ergreifen. - Der Bundesrat wird mit Annahme eines Postulats beauftragt, einen Bericht zu den Service-Public-Leistungen der SRG zu erstellen. - Nach etlichen Stunden Diskussion stimmten die Kammern in ihren Schlussabstimmungen der RTVG-Revision zu, die die Billag-Gebühr für Private und Unternehmen mit einem Jahresumsatz über CHF 500'000 zur generellen Abgabe erhob; der Gewerbeverband ergriff das Referendum. - Der Verkauf von "Le Temps" an Ringier sowie die Erwägung von Markus Somm als möglicher Nachfolger von NZZ-Chefredaktor Markus Spillmann führten dazu, dass in der breiten Öffentlichkeit gleich bei zwei überregionalen Schweizer Qualitätszeitungen Diskussionen zur redaktionellen Unabhängigkeit geführt wurden.