Should we stay or should we join? 30 years of Sovereignism and direct democracy in Switzerland

ABSTRACT

Sovereignism is on the rise. Defending a nation’s political autonomy, fortifying its international borders, preserving cultural identity and shielding the domestic economy from the adverse effects of globalization are core demands. Often contained within research on populism or Euroscepticism, this article conceptualizes Sovereignism as an ideology on its own. Three separate, yet connected, dimensions of Sovereignism are distilled: political, which negates sharing ultimate decision-making with supranational bodies; economic, which concerns market access and trade liberalization; and cultural, which regards foreign citizens as a threat to national culture. Empirically, we track the impact of sovereigntist arguments on citizens’ voting behaviour, by analysing all 68 referendums held in Switzerland between 1983 and 2016 concerning supranational integration, economic ties, immigration, asylum and/or cultural demarcation. We rely on a multilevel analysis of post-vote survey replies to show how the three dimensions interact with party politics, values and contextual factors. Our main finding is that all three dimensions of Sovereignism continue to matter, but that values and party politics have in the meantime absorbed a big part of their impact.

KEYWORDS:

• Sovereignism
• populism
• Switzerland
• direct democracy
• referendum

ORCID

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

Notes

1 E.g. https://www.bk.admin.ch/ch/d/pore/va/20181125/index.html [26.11.2018].

2 We thank one of the journal’s reviewers for drawing our attention to this.

3 See http://fors-nesstar.unil.ch/webview [01.10.2018]. Path: “VOXIT -> projects -> vote -> variable description -> III. arguments for the decision”. In total, 304 referendums were held in that period (BFS 2018). Of the 297 votes surveyed by VOX, no arguments were asked for 38 votes, leaving us with 259.

4 The position of Italian-speaking Swiss compared to the German-speaking and French-speaking Swiss has changed over the years (e.g. Mazzoleni, 2017).

5 Note that the contradiction between shoring up mistrust in the current government as representing a ‘corrupt elite’ and defending one’s state – and by implication, that very same governing elite – is one that is never really resolved by populist sovereigntists.

6 Unfortunately, attitude questions were only assessed from 1994 onwards.

7 This is far from a perfect measure for populism, but since arguments on demarcation are an important part of (right-wing) populist rhetoric, it does at least help in identifying phases of strong appeal to populist arguments.

8 Leaving out the supply variables reduces the size of the coefficients of the three dimensions only marginally, and they all remain strongly significant.

9 These are: EEA accession (6.12.1992), Bilateral Agreements with the EU (21.5.2000), extension of free movement of persons (25.9.2005), continuation and extension of free movement of persons to Romania and Bulgaria (8.2.2009), ban on minarets (29.11.2009), and the initiative ‘against mass immigration’ (9.2.2014).