Swiss Political System and Local Government

Seminar paper from the year 2003 in the subject Politics - Region: Western Europe, grade: 1,3 (A), University of Constance (Faculty for Management Studies), course: Comparative Local Government, language: English, abstract: Switzerland is one of the smallest, oldest and most complex democratic federal states. Localpolitical structure is far more important in Switzerland than in the centralized polities of mostmodern European countries, given the historically decentralized nature of the Swiss system(see Hass, J.K. 1999: 1067). Thus the Swiss municipal organisation has proved to beextremely stable in comparison to other countries. They strongly vary in size and the majorityare very small. Between 1848 and 1998 the number of municipalities was reduced only from3204 to 2914 (see Ladner, A. 1991: 5-6). In this paper, the focus will be on the local government in Switzerland. But before we come tothis part, we think it is necessary to give an overall view of Switzerland in general and itspolitical system. Here, we will also introduce the issue of direct democracy in Switzerland, aswe think it is a characteristic political element within the Swiss democracy and also plays animportant role on the communal and local level. Then we will describe the local level indetail. This will include a short summary about the development of the Swiss communes inhistory, the role of the communes given by the Swiss constitution, the structure andorganization of communes and the responsibilities they have. Finally, we will comment ourfindings and draw conclusions about the grade of decentralization and what follows from thisfor the Swiss democracy.