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W1973570721 abstract "Turnout is very low in Switzerland. Cross-national analyses of turnout typically include a dummy variable for Switzerland to take into account the fact that turnout is much lower than what we would expect in an established democracy with a PR system. In fact turnout is 35 percentage points lower than expected in Switzerland (Blais and Dobrzynska 1998; Blais et al. 2003). Two institutional variables are usually invoked to account for the exceptionally low Swiss turnout.11 I leave aside another peculiarity of Swiss institutions, the widespread use of postal voting. While the impact of postal voting depends a lot on the type of community (negative in rural settings and positive in urban areas; see Funk 2010), the net effect appears to be slightly positive (see Luechinger et al. 2007). As a consequence, postal voting cannot ‘explain’ the exceptionally low turnout in Swiss elections. The first is the agreement by the major parties to share power in the executive (the so-called magic formula). The consequence is that citizens’ votes have no consequence on which parties will form the government. The absence of uncertainty makes the election basically uncompetitive (Franklin 2004). I should note, however, that the argument that the result of the Swiss national elections has no impact on the composition of the government is less compelling since the Swiss Peoples Party (SVP) made this a central theme of the 2007 and 2011 elections. The second is the widespread use of referenda (Powell 1982; Jackman 1987). Swiss citizens are often asked to vote on a host of different issues, and they may feel that the real decisions are made in those referenda rather than in elections. Both factors mean that elections have little import in Switzerland. I propose a different perspective in this research note. I look at the attitudes of Swiss citizens about elections and voting and compare them to those of Germans, using surveys conducted in Lucerne and Zurich at the time of the 2011 Swiss elections and in Lower Saxony and Bavaria at the time of the 2013 German elections by Harris International for the Making Electoral Democracy Work (MEDW) project (see Blais 2010).22 These are the best data that I am aware of which allow me to compare citizens’ views about elections in Switzerland and Germany. I examine how different Swiss and German citizens’ views are and I speculate about the sources of these differences, asking myself whether they can be imputed to the peculiar Swiss institutions. I also determine whether differences in these attitudes can account for the turnout gap between the two countries. Note that the focus is not on explaining turnout in Switzerland but on determining whether attitudes related to elections differ in the two countries and whether they are differently related to turnout, and, in the end, whether they can explain why Switzerland in an outlier with respect to turnout. The data were collected through internet panel surveys conducted in the cantons of Lucerne and Zurich immediately before and after the October 2011 Swiss national election and immediately before and after the September 2013 German elections in the Landers of Lower Saxony and Bavaria. In Lucerne, Zurich and Lower Saxony, there were about 1100 respondents in the pre-election survey and 900 post-election respondents. The sample size is much higher in Bavaria (more than 4,000 in the pre), since the two waves are part of a larger five wave panel survey encompassing the regional, national, and European elections. These are non-probability samples of the population but they are representative in terms of age, gender, education, and region. The data have been weighted to reflect the socio-demographic profile of the electorate and the actual outcome of the elections.33 More specifically, for all the attitudes examined here, which were all measured in the pre-election survey, I have used the Harris weight (PRE_WEIGHT3B) which attempts to match the distribution of age, gender, and education in the sample with the distribution in the electorate and that of vote intentions with the actual outcome of the election (in terms of both turnout and party support). For reported turnout and for the regressions with turnout as the dependent variable, I have weighted the post-election survey to correspond to the actual turnout in each of the cantons and Landers. I examine three sets of attitudes about voting and elections: attitudes about the importance of elections, sense of political efficacy, and sense of civic duty. In each case, I look at the mean score in each of the two Swiss cantons and the two German Landers. The general hypothesis to be tested is whether Swiss citizens think that elections are less important, feel less efficacious, and are less inclined to construe voting as a duty. The mean scores for each of the two Swiss cantons and German Lander, as well as the overall mean score for Switzerland and Germany, are presented in Table 1. In Germany, the data have been reweighted so that Lower Saxony counts as much as Bavaria. Each of the variables has been coded from 0 to 1 to facilitate comparisons. The coding of the variables is explained in the Appendix. I focus on the overall contrast between Switzerland and Germany. The differences between Lucerne and Zurich are strikingly small, being always lower than .03 on the 0 to 1 scale. The differences between Bavaria and Lower Saxony are slightly higher but still relatively small (less than .07). Let us start with the perceived importance of elections. We asked respondents to rate the importance of federal elections to them personally on a scale from 0 to 10. The mean score is 6.3 in Switzerland, against 7.4 in Germany. This is a substantial difference, a difference which indeed makes a lot of sense. Elections matter less in Switzerland, and Swiss citizens do realize it. It could be that Swiss citizens find federal elections less important simply because Switzerland is a more decentralized federation than Germany. But when we ask about the perceived importance of regional (cantonal or Land) elections, we observe a similar gap (.09 versus .11). The difference between the two countries, then, is not mainly due to the greater decentralization of the Swiss federation. Does a lower perceived importance transfer into a lower level of interest for the elections? Yes it does, at least partly. The mean reported level of interest in the elections is 5.5 in Switzerland, against 7.3 in Germany. If we regress the level of interest in the elections on their perceived importance plus a dummy for Switzerland, we can see that a good part of the gap in interest can be explained by the differential in perceived importance (results not shown).44 More precisely, the coefficient for the Swiss dummy equals 1.2, which suggests that perceived importance accounts for 0.6 of the 1.8 gap in interest. If the lower level of interest for elections in Switzerland is related to the peculiar institutional setting that makes elections less meaningful, we should observe little difference between Switzerland and Germany with respect to general interest in politics. Table 1 shows that general political interest is higher in Germany (6.8 versus 6.1 in Switzerland). While interest in the election is higher than interest in politics in Germany, the reverse holds in Switzerland, which is exactly what we should expect. What about sense of political efficacy? We can distinguish internal and external efficacy (Craig et al. 1990). With respect to the latter, the MEDW survey includes an agree/disagree item with the statement that ‘sometime politics and government seem so complicated that a person like me can't really understand what's going on’. Swiss citizens are more likely to agree with the statement than their German counterparts. I would argue that this has little to do with the presence of grand coalitions or referenda as such, and is probably more related to the fact that Swiss institutions are indeed more complex and varied, with the use of different voting systems for the lower and upper houses, the existence of panachage, the direct election of the executive in some cantons, and so on. The MEDW includes two questions measuring external political efficacy. The first asks respondents how much they believe the federal government cares about what people like them think. The mean efficacy score is higher in Switzerland (.42) than in Germany (.32). Swiss citizens are more sanguine about the government's sensitivity to the concerns of ordinary citizens. This is in line with the view that the possibility of referenda induces legislators and governments to pay closer attention to their constituents’ views (Feld and Matsusaka 2003); this is also consistent with the finding that in the United States exposure to direct democracy has a positive effect on external political efficacy (Bowler and Donovan 2002). The second question asks how well (on a 0 to 10 scale) the election ensures that the person's views are reflected in Parliament. In this case there is very little difference between Switzerland and Germany, with respective mean scores of .44 and .46. It could be argued, however, that this question taps people's judgment about the quality of representation more than their sense of efficacy. That being said, it is interesting that the Swiss do not feel that their views are better represented in parliament despite the fact that they have the possibility of expressing their preferences on the ballot in a more nuanced fashion, as they have the options of crossing and adding names on the party lists as well as doing panachage or cumulation (Stephenson et al. 2013). In short, Swiss citizens feel somewhat more externally efficacious than the Germans, which suggests that the presence of referenda has positive as well as negative effects on their orientations towards electoral democracy. At the same time the Swiss feel less internally efficacious, which might be a consequence of the complicated institutional setting that they find themselves in. Finally, the MEDW survey had two questions about sense of civic duty. The first question, inspired by Blais and Achen (2013) asks people whether they construe voting first and foremost as a duty or a choice. Sense of duty is weaker in Switzerland (30%) than in Germany (38%). The second question asks people how guilty they would feel (from not guilty at all to very guilty) if they did not vote in the election. The mean guilt score is much higher in Germany (.56) than in Switzerland (.39). Do the Swiss have a weaker sense of duty to vote because they feel that elections are less important in their country? Yes in part. If I regress the guilt score on the perceived importance of elections plus a Swiss dummy, the initial .17 gap is reduced to .09 (results not shown). In short, there are differences in how Swiss and German citizens perceive voting and elections. The Swiss find elections less important and interesting, they find politics more complicated, and they have a weaker sense of duty to vote. All these differences could explain the lower turnout in Switzerland. Note, however, that these differences are not huge, usually about 10 percentage points, and they are lower than the turnout gap. Furthermore, external political efficacy appears to be slightly higher in Switzerland. The final question to be addressed is whether the turnout gap between Switzerland and Germany can be accounted by differences in perceptions and attitudes across these two countries. The turnout gap between the two countries is 20 percentage points (62% in Germany and 42% in Switzerland). Turnout is higher than the national average in our two Swiss cantons (51%) and in our two German Landers (72%), but the overall gap (21 percentage points) between the two countries is the same. The question is whether this turnout gap can be explained by differences in the general attitudes towards voting and elections in the two countries. To that effect, I have regressed the decision to vote or abstain in the merged data set on the perceived importance of the election, the perceived complexity of politics, and sense of guilt, plus a dummy variable for Switzerland.55 I leave external political efficacy out since it is in fact higher in Switzerland and cannot account for the lower turnout; it is not significant if added to Model 1. I do not include interest in the election since it is too close conceptually to the dependent variable. If these attitudes explain the entire gap, the Swiss dummy should be very small and not significant. Table 2 presents the findings. We can see that people are more inclined to vote when they feel that the election is important, when they do not find politics too complicated and when they would feel guilty to abstain. More importantly, however, the Swiss dummy variable remains highly significant even after including all these attitudes, which suggests that these attitudes do not contribute very much to explaining why turnout is lower in Switzerland than in Germany. This can be illustrated with the following simulation. Let us take an average German citizen, with mean scores on each of the three attitudes listed in Table 2. On the basis of the Probit estimation, the predicted probability of that person's voting rather than abstaining is 0.82. The same Probit estimation indicates that the predicted probability of voting for a Swiss citizen with exactly the same attitudes is 0.66, that is, 16 percentage points lower.66 The simulations reported here are performed by modifying the variable(s) of interest and keeping the values of all the other variables as they are for every individual, through the MARGINS command in STATA. It would seem that the turnout gap between the two countries has relatively little to do with differences in voters’ attitudes. Model 1 in Table 2 assumes that these attitudes have the same impact in the two countries. We can relax that assumption by adding interaction effects between each attitude and the Swiss dummy. This allows us to determine if any of these attitudes has a stronger or weaker effect in Switzerland than in Germany. The findings are presented in Model 2. We can see that there is one significant interaction effect; internal efficacy has a much stronger effect in Switzerland than in Germany, where it does not have any impact. The implications are illustrated in Figure 1. The predicted probability of voting for those with the highest score on the internal efficacy question, that is, those who disagree strongly with the statement sometimes politics and government seem so complicated, is similar in Germany (71%) and Switzerland (72%). But there is a big gap among those with the lowest internal efficacy score, that is, those who strongly agree with the statement: the predicted probability of voting is 72% in Germany against a dismal 43% in Switzerland. The turnout gap between the two countries is concentrated among those who perceive politics to be complicated. I find it quite telling that the Swiss’ decision to vote or abstain is so strongly affected by their perception that politics is complicated or not. I would argue that the Swiss electoral system and more generally the Swiss system of government are the most complicated to be found anywhere in the world. I can easily understand that many people would feel baffled by this elaborate set of rules for the conduct of elections and referenda as well for the composition of the government, and would be tempted to conclude that there are more important things to do in life than to make sense of all these rules, especially as they vary from one canton to the other as well as across levels of government. In short, the turnout gap between Germany and Switzerland is only weakly explained by differences in attitudes about voting and elections. That being said, these attitudes do not quite play the same role in the two countries. Feelings of internal efficacy, more specifically the view that politics is complicated, appear to matter more in Switzerland. My goal in this paper has been to look at survey data about how citizens view voting and elections in Switzerland, compared to Germany, and to determine whether these data can help us understand why turnout is exceptionally low in Switzerland. The most popular explanation for the very low turnout in Switzerland is that elections don't matter much since “the government of Switzerland is a cartel in which the same parties form part of the governing coalition year after year (with the prime ministership rotating every year), no matter what the outcome of legislative elections” (Franklin 2004: 97). The findings reported here partly support that interpretation. Elections are perceived to be less important in Switzerland than in Germany, and as a consequence interest in elections and sense of civic duty are weaker. Furthermore, it is the case that people are less inclined to vote when they perceive an election to be less important. My findings suggest, however, that this is only part of the story, and not the main story. On the one hand, the gap in perceived importance (10 percentage points) is much lower than the turnout gap (20 points). On the other hand, most of the initial turnout gap between the two countries remains when we control for differences in perceived importance. The fact remains that elections are perceived to be less interesting in Switzerland than in Germany, and this is the attitude with the largest gap between the two countries. That gap, as I have noted above, is related to differences in the perceived importance of elections but only partly. The data presented here suggest at least another culprit: the complexity of Swiss electoral institutions. This is consistent with recent work which shows that the educational gap in turnout depends on the complexity of the voting system (Gallego 2010). Another potential culprit is voter fatigue. People are invited to vote in all kinds of elections and referenda in Switzerland, much more frequently than anywhere else in the world, and it makes sense to believe that a good number of citizens get bored or just feel that this is too much. There is no question in the MEDW to tap such feeling of voter fatigue. Franklin (2004) notes that turnout is lower when little time has elapsed since the last election, which is a sign of electoral fatigue (see also Rallings et al. 2003).77 Franklin (2004, 98, note 5) also notes that in the particular case of Switzerland “the devaluing of parliamentary elections following the institution of the Swiss ‘Golden Rule’ was exacerbated by the increasing use of referendums”. Consistent with this interpretation is the finding by Freitag and Stadelmann-Steffen (2010) that turnout in cantonal elections is negatively correlated with the frequency of cantonal ballot measures. My tentative conclusion, therefore, is that turnout is lower in Switzerland for a combination of factors, and that the lesser import of elections is only one of these factors. The ‘overdose’ of popular consultations and the extraordinary complexity of the political system are equally important reasons. I would thus end with a plea for more research on whether Swiss citizens feel there are just too many elections and referenda and whether they would prefer a simple Westminster (or German type) system, and/or on whether turnout is higher in the cantons (or municipalities) with fewer elections/referenda and simpler institutional settings.88 I note the interesting study by Freitag (2010) of the factors that affect turnout in sub-national parliamentary elections. Freitag does not find any significant correlation between a number of institutional variables and turnout, but he does not consider the specific dimensions of voter fatigue or system complexity. Bühlmann and Freitag (2006) report that turnout is influenced by the degree of party competition but that would not explain the exceptionally low turnout observed in Switzerland unless competition is systematically weaker in Switzerland than in other countries, which is highly doubtful. For a recent overview on the system complexity in all Swiss cantons see Bühlmann et al. (2013). I wish to thank Simon Labbé St-Vincent for excellent research assistance. Anonymous reviewers also provided useful comments that significantly improved the article. Importance Federal Election (Q34B) Please rate the importance to you personally of these elections: Federal Election 0 – Not important at all, 10 - Extremely important, Don't know (missing) Importance Regional Election (Q34A) Please rate the importance to you personally of these elections: Lander elections (Germany) /Cantonal election (Switzerland) 0 – Not important at all, 10 - Extremely important, Don't know (missing) Interest (general) (Q5) How much interest do you have: In politics generally? 0 - No interest at all, 10 - A great deal of interest, Don't know (missing) Interest (election) (Q4) How much interest do you have: In the election? 0 - No interest at all, 10 - A great deal of interest, Don't know (missing) Not Too Complex (Q35A REVERSED) Do you strongly disagree, somewhat disagree, somewhat agree, or strongly agree with the following statements: Sometimes politics and government seem so complicated that a person like me can't really understand what's going on? 0-Strongly agree, 0.33- Somewhat agree, 0.66- Somewhat disagree, 1- Strongly disagree, Don't know (missing) Government Cares (Q32B) How much do you think the following care about what people like you think: The federal government? 0- None, 0.33- A little, 0.66- Some, 1- A lot, Don't know (missing) Views Reflected (Q49A) How well do you think that federal elections ensure that your views are reflected in the federal parliament? 0 - Not at all, 10 – Totally, Don't know (missing) Duty to vote (Q44B) For you personally, is voting first and foremost a duty or a choice: In federal elections? Duty (1), Choice (0), Don't know (missing) Guilty (Q31) If you didn't vote in this election, would you personally feel very guilty, somewhat guilty, not very guilty, or not guilty at all? Not guilty at all (0), Not very guilty (.33), Somewhat guilty (.66), Very guilty (1), Don't know (missing) André Blais is Professor in the department of political science at the Université de Montréal and holds a Canada Research Chair in Electoral Studies." @default.
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W1973570721 date "2014-06-23" @default.
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W1973570721 title "Why is Turnout So Low in Switzerland? Comparing the Attitudes of Swiss and German Citizens Towards Electoral Democracy" @default.
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