Importable or exceptional? Swiss direct-democratic instruments in the French and German Parliaments, 2000–19

Abstract

Recent years have seen growing interest in the ways politicians conceive direct democracy instruments (DDIs) and their integration into representative systems as one way to increase citizen participation. Our investigation focuses on how French and German members of parliament (MPs) have mobilized DDIs in Switzerland as a (counter-) model in parliaments from 2000 to 2019, a period marked about debates on the need to complement representative democracy with alternative procedures. The Swiss case acts as a prism of perception through which we can trace the larger conceptual struggles around democracy and DDIs. We underline the heightened topical importance of DDIs in the 2000s and their increasingly controversial nature, especially in the late 2010s following the rise of populism and the Brexit Referendum. The growth of anti-system and radical-right challengers presenting a DDI agenda and claiming the Swiss model for their own led mainstream parties to a defensive position as regards to representative democracy, whether by rejecting DDIs more than ever or by trying to reclaim their interpretative monopoly over them.