ABSTRACT
The way one gets a passport in Switzerland is very different from the procedures in other countries. To my knowledge, Switzerland is the only nation state in the world where naturalisations happen at the local level. Every municipality, be it a town of 100,000 or a village of 400 inhabitants, is accorded the right to decide who can become a Swiss citizen. As regulations on the national and cantonal (sub-national) levels are very sparse, each political local entity decides on the formal procedure and criteria according to which its alien residents are naturalised. Given the high degree of autonomy possessed by municipalities in this policy field, the naturalisation procedures, the applied criteria, and consequently the ratio of rejected candidates vary greatly from one municipality to another.
