Squaring the Circle: The Geometry of Power-Sharing in the Swiss Canton of Berne

Abstract

In liberal democracies, the protection of territorial minorities can take various forms. This article presents and discusses the geometric mean as a peculiar mechanism used in the Swiss Canton of Bern to accommodate its francophone minority. The geometric mean combines corporate consociationalism with centripetal democracy in an innovative way, using both regional and total votes obtained by minority candidates to designate the one francophone member of the otherwise German-speaking seven-seat cantonal executive. After presenting the history and reasons for the emergence of this mechanism, we analyse six decades (1958–2018) of executive elections. This allows assessing the effect of this instrument introduced in 1993. Both this historical analysis as well as an assessment from a liberal-democratic perspective show that the geometric mean presents an almost ideal mix of minority accommodation and respect for the will of the majority in a simple, open-ended and liberal-democratic way.

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the journal’s two reviewers for their comments on earlier versions. An initial draft was presented at the Annual Congress of the Swiss Political Science Association in Geneva (February 2018) and we thank Tobias Arnold as well as Jean-Thomas Arrighi for their feedback.

ORCID

Sean Mueller http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4369-1449

Notes

1 We purposefully disregard Lijphart’s other two elements here: territorial autonomy is conceptually distinct from shared rule (cf. also Caluwaerts & Reuchamps, 2015, p. 280; Keil, 2015, p. 209), and whether and which types of (grand) coalitions materialise is an empirical, not a design-question (cf. McGarry & O’Leary, 2016, p. 492).

2 Of course, this idea is far too simple because the question of equality also contains a discussion about who exactly has the political right to decide. More social-democratic models of democracy (e.g. Meyer, 2009; Rawls, 2003; Sen & Nussbaum, 1993) would draw yet another picture. However, for our purposes here this simple, liberal idea of equality suffices.

3 In censuses from 2010 onwards, a combination of registry and survey techniques is used. Also, instead of their mother tongue, respondents can indicate more than one main language and ‘unknowns’ are recorded separately. Nevertheless, language proportions have remained broadly similar to those of Figure 2: 10% French-speakers in Berne overall, 86% in Jura Bernois and 31% in the Biel/Bienne district (BFS, 2017).

4 ‘As soon as one accepts to guarantee the Jura Bernois a seat in the government, one must also provide an electoral mechanism that guarantees the election of a “representative of Jura Bernois” which actually enjoys its trust. […] Given that the “accident” of 1986 can happen again anytime, we demand that the “weighted score” is adopted for the election of “the representative of Jura Bernois”’. (own translation; letter retrieved from the Archives of Berne).

5 How much more precious an individual vote from JB is compared to one from the rest of the canton becomes clearest when there are diverging minorities, as was the case in 2014. To compensate the 970 votes advance that P. Perrenoud had over M. Bühler in the Bernese Jura, the latter would have needed to be ahead by at least 18’022 votes in the rest of Berne, i.e. he would have needed a minimum of 8’563 additional votes there (see Proof in the Annex). Different absolute numbers of votes in the two parts of the canton will lead to different results, of course.

 

Additional information

Funding

Sean Mueller’s work on this article was supported by Swiss National Science Foundation project no. PZOOP1_161257.