Independent regulatory agencies (IRAs) were created in various sectors and on different governmental levels to implement liberalization policies. This paper investigates the link between IRAs' independence, which is said to promote regulatory credibility and the use of technical expertise, and their accountability, which is related to the need for controlling and legitimizing independent regulators. The literature on the regulatory state anticipates a positive relation between the independence and accountability of IRAs, but systematic empirical evidence is still lacking. To tackle this question, this paper measures and compares the independence and the accountability of IRAs in three differentially liberalized sectors in Switzerland (telecommunications, electricity and railways). With the application of Social Network Analysis, this piece of research shows that IRAs can be de facto independent and accountable at the same time, but the two features do not necessarily co-evolve in the same direction.

We examine the conditions leading social movement organizations to adopt consensus in their internal decision making. To do so, we look at organizations of the Swiss global justice movement, which puts the search for consensus at center stage. Our findings show that the ways in which social movement organizations take decisions and their vision of democracy more generally are not simply a matter of free choice by their leaders and members, but depend on certain organizational characteristics. The most important one is a small organizational size, which is a crucial condition for the adoption of consensus in internal decision making. This condition combines with another one pertaining to the cultural tradition of contention represented by the social movement family to explain consensus. In addition, our findings show that small, transnational organizations following inclusive participatory practices are also more likely to adopt consensus when they make decisions.

Due to the absence of a strong constitutional veto player, comparative research uses to classify Austria as country with weak federal structures, occasionally even as a “federation without federalism”. From an institutional perspective, the assessment is definitely correct, in particular with regard to the nearly insignificant status of the second chamber Bundesrat. Apart from constitutional provisions, however, there are informal forces at work in decision-making processes. Our thesis is that any approach ignoring the fact that the nominal constitution is paralleled by a real one falls short. Instead, we focus on the Conference of State Governors which, though not established by law, is a strong player in Austria's multi-layered system qualifying the picture of “weak” federalism. The paper gives on overview of origin and function of the conference and its ambivalent role in making up for the shortcomings of the federal structures. Taking recent attempts of reorganizing fiscal equalization between states and federation as an example, the need of reforming the allocation of rights and duties between the different levels and, at the same time, the obstacles blocking the reform is outlined and analyzed.

This article investigates the benefit of participation in policymaking. Based on data from interviews with various interest groups, private organisations, and representatives of regions that had been involved in recent policymaking processes in Switzerland, this study analyses the relationship between participation and satisfaction with the policy outcome. The study looks at two different aspects of outcome satisfaction: perceived consensus of a decision and preference attainment. The results show that the level of participation is related to both aspects of outcome satisfaction but that the strength of association is dependent on the type of interest group and the level of conflict among the groups participating in the decision-making process.

The position of political parties on policy issues is crucial for many questions of political science, including studies of political representation. This research note examines different methods for obtaining party positions on immigration in retrospective. Party positions are obtained using pooled expert surveys, manual coding of party manifestos with a conventional codebook, manual coding of manifestos using check-lists, and automatic coding of manifestos using Wordscores and a dictionary of keywords respectively. In addition, positions from a media analysis and a retrospective evaluation of researchers in the field of immigration are used. The results suggest that most methods differentiate the same order of party positions. While there are high correlations between many methods, the different methods tend not to agree on the exact positions. The automatic dictionary approach does not seem to measure party positions reliably.