ABSTRACT
Introduction Federalism and democracy are among the core concepts of political science. The respective ideas have informed institutional design and political practice in a great many countries around the world. Over the last few decades, they have been increasingly debated within and beyond academia. At the same time, institutional reforms inspired by federal ideas have been carried out or are underway in several prominent political systems. The theoretical question of the connections between the two is thus most topical and deserves renewed scholarly investigation of the kind conducted in this volume. That there are many linkages between federalism and democracy is beyond doubt. Indeed, it is often argued that they reinforce each other. Certainly, if democracy can exist without federalism, the latter cannot really flourish without the former, as the historical experience of the communist federations amply demonstrated. The intimate connection between federalism and democracy can probably be observed nowhere better than in Switzerland, a political system in which the two elements have evolved in intimate fusion over a very long period of time. This chapter thus intends to explore the Swiss experience of federal democracy with the aim of drawing some general lessons on the connections between these two elements in the early twenty-first century. It proceeds as follows. Section 1 outlines the historical evolution of federalism and democracy in Switzerland. The following section 2 describes the key properties of federal democracy in contemporary Switzerland and emphasizes the interlocking effect of institutions and patterns of political culture. Section 3 gazes into the future by identifying some key challenges Swiss federal democracy is currently facing and how they are likely to evolve in the future. The fourth section then draws some lessons from the Swiss experience for the wider debate on the relationship between federalism and democracy, both in terms of dynamics that reinforce each other and of tensions between them. The concluding section argues that despite Switzerland’s peculiarities, these lessons help illuminate key aspects of federal democracy in other systems and can thus be widely applied.
