Decision-Making Process

Abstract The formulation of policies lies at the heart of any political system and is the crucial task assigned to decision makers. Analysing problems, identifying possible solutions, bargaining over draft proposals and bills, and—eventually—adopting a legislative act is the routine business of senior officials, interest groups, experts, political parties, and MPs. The purpose of this chapter is to present the state of knowledge on Swiss federal decision-making processes. It starts with a brief description of the institutional set-up of processes (initiation phase, pre-parliamentary phase, parliamentary phase, and referendum phase) and then turns to a finer-grained analysis of each decision-making phase and links between them. The analysis of these links is all the more important, since the multiplication of arenas is characteristic of the Swiss decision-making system; this is meant to make sure legislative proposals will proceed smoothly from one decision-making phase to the next. In particular, the risk of failure at the end of a process in a referendum vote has favoured the development of the preparatory phase of legislation. The chapter also assesses the respective weights of the main state and non-state actors participating in the process, highlights how institutions influence actors’ strategies, and examines changes in the characteristics of decision-making processes over time. On this basis, it evaluates the relevance of some claims that one finds in the contemporary literature, such as those regarding the ineffectiveness of the pre-parliamentary procedures, the ‘end of consensus’, or the slow pace and low innovation capacity of the Swiss decision-making process.