Representation Matters: The Impact of Descriptive Women's Representation on the Political Involvement of Women

In a cross-country comparison of 33 European countries, we tested whether a high degree of female representation attenuates the assumed negative impact of gender on political involvement. Our multilevel analyses show positive interactive effects of female representation: the degree to which the representation of women in a given country's national parliament was descriptively adequate was positively related to women's ratings of the importance of politics and self-reported political interest. With respect to political participation, the findings are mixed.

More Money, Fewer Problems? Cross-Level Effects of Economic Deprivation on Political Representation

While equal political representation of all citizens is a fundamental democratic goal, it is hampered empirically in a multitude of ways. This study examines how the societal level of economic inequality affects the representation of relatively poor citizens by parties and governments. Using CSES survey data for citizens’ policy preferences and expert placements of political parties, empirical evidence is found that in economically more unequal societies, the party system represents the preferences of relatively poor citizens worse than in more equal societies. This moderating effect of economic equality is also found for policy congruence between citizens and governments, albeit slightly less clear-cut.

Climate change in Switzerland: a review of physical, institutional, and political aspects

Climate change is clearly discernible in observed climate records in Switzerland. It impacts on natural systems, ecosystems, and economic sectors such as agriculture, tourism, and energy, and it affects Swiss livelihood in various ways. The observed and projected changes call for a response from the political system, which in Switzerland is characterized by federalism and direct democratic instruments. Swiss climate science embraces natural and social sciences and builds on institutionalized links between researchers, public, and private stakeholders. In this article, we review the physical, institutional, and political aspects of climate change in Switzerland. We show how the current state of Swiss climate science and policy developed over the past 20 years in the context of international developments and national responses. Specific to Switzerland is its topographic setting with mountain regions and lowlands on both sides of the Alpine ridge, which makes climate change clearly apparent and for some aspects (tourist sector, hydropower, and extreme events) highly relevant and better perceivable (e.g., retreating glaciers). Not surprisingly the Alpine region is of central interest in Swiss climate change studies.

Social Inequality in Political Participation: The Dark Sides of Individualisation

Has the participatory gap between social groups widened over the past decades? And if so, how can it be explained? Based on a re-analysis of 94 electoral surveys in eight Western European countries between 1956 and 2009, this article shows that the difference in national election turnout between the half of the population with the lowest level of education and the half with the highest has increased. It shows that individualisation – the decline of social integration and social control – is a major cause of this trend. In their electoral choices, citizens with fewer resources – in terms of education – rely more heavily on cues and social control of the social groups to which they belong. Once the ties to these groups loosen, these cues and mobilising norms are no longer as strong as they once were, resulting in an increasing abstention of the lower classes on Election Day. In contrast, citizens with abundant resources rely much less on cues and social control, and the process of individualisation impacts on their participatory behaviour to a much lesser extent. The article demonstrates this effect based on a re-analysis of five cumulative waves of the European Social Survey.

Shared Rule in Federal Political Systems: Conceptual Lessons from Subnational Switzerland

This article reconceptualizes shared rule and uses novel data to measure it, thus addressing two shortcomings of federal literature. First, while most studies focus on self-rule, one question that is largely neglected is how lower-level governments can influence politics at a higher level in the absence of “second” chambers. The answer is through shared rule. A second shortcoming is that even when addressing this question, scholars concentrate on constitutional-administrative aspects of vertical intergovernmentalism, neglecting more informal, “political” dynamics. Comparing the twenty-six Swiss cantons allows drawing two lessons for federal studies: That shared rule is multifaceted and complex, and that to study informal territorial actors as well as direct political processes is indispensable to understand how power is actually distributed in federal political systems.

Federalism and the Concept of Political Territoriality: Towards an Analytical Framework for Comparative Territorial Politics

The core issues comparative territorial politics addresses are how and why territory is used to delimit, maintain, or create political power; and with what kind of consequences for efficiency (output) and legitimacy (input). The aim of this article is to integrate various research strands into the comparative study of territorial politics, with federal studies at its core. As an example of a conceptual payoff, ‘political territoriality’ refers the observer to three dimensions of the strategic use of areal boundaries for political power. By focusing on territory as a key variable of political systems, the actors, processes and institutions are first analytically separated and continuously measured, enhancing internal validity, and then theoretically integrated, which allows more valid external inferences than classic, legal-institutionalist federal studies. After discussing the boundaries and substance of comparative territorial politics as a federal discipline, political territoriality is developed towards an analytical framework applicable to politics at any governmental level. The claims are modest: political territoriality does not serve so much as an explanatory concept as rather an ‘attention-directing device’ for federal studies.

The Personal Foundations of Political Tolerance towards Immigrants

In this paper, we expand previous research on the psychological foundations of attitudes towards immigrants by evaluating the role of the Big Five personality traits with regard to the formation of political tolerance. Following the literature, we elaborate tolerance as a sequential concept of rejection and acceptance to uncover differentiating effects of personality on both immigrant-specific prejudices as well as on the assignment of the right to vote as a pivotal political privilege to this group. Using a representative sample of the Swiss population, with its distinctive history related to the immigration issue, our two-step Heckman selection models reveal that extroverts and people who score low in agreeableness exhibit negative attitudes towards immigrants. At the same time, only openness to experience is significantly connected to the likeliness of granting immigrants the right to vote.

Direct democracy and political trust: Enhancing trust, initiating distrust–or both?

This study investigates the relationship between direct democracy and political trust. We suggest a solution to the controversy in research centering on positive versus negative effects of direct democracy by analytically differentiating between the availability of direct democratic rights and the actual use of those rights. Theoretically, greater availability of direct democratic rights may enhance political trust by increasing citizens’ perception that political authorities can be controlled as well as by incentivizing political authorities to act trustworthily. In contrast, the actual use of the corresponding direct democratic instruments may initiate distrust as it signals to citizens that political authorities do not act in the public’s interest. We test both hypotheses for the very first time with sub-national data of Switzerland. The empirical results seem to support our theoretical arguments.