POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC ELITES IN SWITZERLAND

ABSTRACT

As a legacy of the early stages of its state building process, Switzerland continues to be characterised by a cohesive elite whose members simultaneously occupy political and economic positions. Whereas sectoral analyses of the economic or political elite are widespread, few researchers have scrutinised the connections between business and politics. Therefore, this paper focuses on the linkages between the economic and political fields. Based on a joint multiple correspondence analysis of the CEOs and board members of the 110 largest Swiss companies in 2000 and 256 parliamentary members, we examine the interactional and objective relations between the fields through an analysis of personal interchange, participation in meeting places and structural homology of educational capital. It appears that the connections between elites are cumulative: in each field, the dominant faction shares a background in law or engineering, participates in meeting places, and personally moves between the fields. Reversely, the dominated, which come from a rather heterogeneous educational background, are excluded from interactional relations and moves between the two fields. That the two forms of elite coordination coincide and reinforce each other could be typical for a small country with little differentiated fields, where elite members quickly get to know each other and can easily meet on a regular basis.

Keywords:

• economic elites
• political elites
• fields
• multiple correspondence analysis

Notes

¹Especially in the countries where there is a certain exchange between the two elite groups – such as France (Charle 1987), the US (Freitag 1975; Domhoff 2005), and Switzerland (Kriesi 1980; Rothböck et al. 1999).

²This election procedure gives the existing group members the right to determine who can and cannot become a member of the group.

³Meeting places are not easy to operationalise empirically. In the Swiss case, the Rotary Club and the army are both examples of nationally influential organisations. The Rotary Club is the largest Swiss service club at the national level, while the Swiss army counts as a traditional elite training institution (Jann 2003). However, they were chosen here also for pragmatic reasons, as they are some of the few such institutions on which we have data.

⁴To give a concrete example, the actors without a university degree in the field of political and economic elites share a homologous situation, as they are both confronted to fractions who possess a high volume of educational capital in their respective fields.

⁵To understand the relations between two fields there are two strategies available: to analyse them within a single space (see for example Hjellebrekke et al. 2007) or to compare two different field analyses. We have no a priori preference, but think that in our case a two space-solution might be more interesting and appropriate: (a) according to Bourdieu fields are endowed with specific logics, structures, resources and stakes. If one is interested in these differences, then a separate analysis can be more appropriate. (b) As opposed to Hjellebrekke et al. (2007) or also Denord et al. (2011) we do not have at our disposal data on all sectors of society (such as university, church, legal system, art, etc.). However, we probably have more detailed information on both the fields of political and the economic elite. Therefore, we decided to concentrate on the relations between these two fields specifically and not to conceptualise the two as part of one single field of power.

⁶This project has been conducted at the University of Lausanne by Thomas David and André Mach, with funding from the Swiss National Science Foundation. The data collection has been carried out by Stépanie Ginalski, Frédéric Rebmann, Andrea Pilotti and Steven Piguet.

⁷Both of these definitions of the economic and political elites are selective and raise certain problems. In the field of political elites, it seems obvious that additional groups such as the civil servants, party officials, and members of regional political elites (i.e., the members of cantonal governments) are also important. For data collection purposes, we had to constrain ourselves to members of parliament and members of the federal government.

⁸The label ‘agriculture and other disciplines’ refers also to other non-university occupations such as teachers, nurses or tradesmen. Only a part of this group has an education in agriculture.

⁹Because in MCA every category must be larger than 5%, we have pragmatically pooled together the French-speaking universities. Also, as only few politicians have a degree from St. Gall, it has been grouped together with the University of Basel.

¹⁰To avoid an imbalanced analysis we have discarded the educational level as an active variable.

¹¹Because of their secretive nature and the decentralised structures, data about service clubs, such as the Rotary Club, are rare and require a cumbersome data collection process. We were able, for the first time, for the whole of Switzerland, to access these data at the Swiss National Library.

¹²Economic Interest Associations, according to Schmitter and Streeck (1999), figure as intermediary organisations and, in this function, both articulate the interests of their members (i.e., the logic of the membership) and influence the political process (i.e., the logic of influence). For an application to the Swiss case, see ‘Publication of the authors (2009)’.

¹³In the year 2000, based on the election of 1999, the Swiss People's Party (SVP, which is culturally conservative-nationalist and economically liberal) occupied 30% of the seats; the Christian-Democratic Party (CVP, which is culturally conservative and economically moderately liberal) occupied 15%; the Liberal-Democratic Party (FDP, which is culturally and economically liberal) occupied 18%; the Social-Democratic Party (SPS, which is culturally liberal and economically moderately welfare-oriented) comprised 25% of members of parliament; and the Green Party (GP, which is culturally liberal and economically moderately welfare-oriented, and emphasises environmental issues) comprised 10% of MPs. As smaller parties were counted under the category of their closest political ally, these numbers slightly differ from the ‘official’ proportions.

¹⁴We have integrated age in a former version of these analyses, but it was not a significant factor.

¹⁵Engineering is only used as a passive category. It appeared to be redundant with the category ETHZ (as this University is the only one that dispenses training in engineering in Switzerland at this level).

¹⁶The dictionnaire historique de la Suisse defines extra-parliamentary commissions as ‘organisms affiliated to the federal administration, which, in its majority, is composed of persons external to the civil service. They are deployed in almost all sectors of activity of the administration’. See http://www.hls-dhs-dss.ch/textes/d/D10393.php (accessed 1 June 2011; translated by the authors).

¹⁷Among these powerful actors of Swiss political life, we can count economic interest associations such as ‘Economie Suisse’, interest associations of specific sectors such as ‘Schweizerische Bankiervereinigung’, and also unions such as ‘Union syndicale suisse/Schweizerischer Gewerkschaftsbund’.

¹⁸This integration of network indicators as an MCA modality is rather recent and goes beyond the orthodoxy of analysis of the economic field. For a more detailed methodological explanation, see Albrecht (2002; publication of authors, 2012). The degree of firm centrality is an expression of the number of ties a company has to other companies in the network, whereas the betweenness of persons determines the extent to which a person lies between other nodes in the network. We are aware that these indicators of network centrality cover only one aspect of power (and neglect others) and that the interpretation of network centrality depends on the content of the network relations. Nevertheless we consider network centrality as a comparatively good indicator of power (Borgatti et al. 2002).

¹⁹The liberal party is historically – and still today – very close to business.

²⁰Except some trade unionists.

²¹Usually concentration ellipses (with 86% of individuals) are used. As we make no hypothesis on the form of the ellipses, we think that in this case indicator ellipses improve the visibility and therefore the interpretability of the fraction across fields. It is smaller and allows therefore a better visual identification of fractions.

²²It is important to note, that the two spaces are differently constructed and that therefore the mean distances between positions and the mean modality points differ. Nevertheless, the overall constellation of the field is comparable and the graphs give an impression of the main structural homologies, as well as the interactions between the two fields.