Introduction

As we have seen, Swiss ‘consensus democracy’ is characterized by a high degree of power sharing between different institutions and political actors, and by a large number of veto points, where policy proposals can be blocked by coalitions of opposing actors. Following Neidhart's (1970) well-known argument, we have already pointed out that the direct-democratic opening of the Swiss political system has led to the transformation of a ‘plebiscitary democracy’ into a ‘negotiation democracy’ (chapter 4). In other words, all actors capable of making a credible referendum threat have been integrated into the decision-making process. This includes not only the major political parties that have all been integrated into a stable, grand coalition (see chapter 5), but also major interest groups, the cantons and even social movement organizations, which are usually integrated from the start into elaborate pre-parliamentary consultation and negotiation procedures.

As a result of its inclusive and complex character, the political decision-making process in Switzerland has traditionally been reactive, slow and incremental (Kriesi 1998a: 293–7). Thus, decision making with regard to major societal problems is usually only taken up under immense external pressure – either from the international environment, or from exogenous domestic sources such as the economy or the citizens. Moreover, the decision-making process usually takes a very long time. Poitry (1989) calculated the average duration of such a process for all the proposals adopted by Parliament during the legislative period 1971–6.