Hanspeter Kriesi

I have to admit that I gave up on this book very early and only browsed it to the end. I was expecting a general discussion of how direct democracy works in Switzerland. Instead this turned out to be a mind-numbing exercise in political science, where argumentative points are made only through correlation analysis. The author has constructed a huge data set from survey questions posed to citizens in conjunction with direct referenda. His principal conclusions seem to be that direct democracy in Switzerland yields informed decisions and that political elites have significant influence on the outcome of votes. There might be a whiff of paradox in the combination of these two conclusions, but they can't be taken too seriously anyway. No doubt the author reports what his numerical evidence indicates, but elegant tables filled with regression data cannot compensate for the lack of theoretical grounding which would have facilitated a real argument. I didn't find anything to like in this book and I will have to look for a good analysis of Swiss democracy elsewhere.… (meer)