Dominance or Challenge? An Explanation of Power Structures Among Coalitions in Swiss Decision-Making Processes

This paper studies the conditions under which a given power distribution among coalitions of collective actors in political decision-making processes emerge. The distribution of power among actors is one of the basic dimensions of politics and is important because of its influence on the output of the decision-making processes. The paper distinguishes between ideal-types of power structures with a dominant coalition (“dominance”) and structures with distributed power among several coalitions (“challenge”). It takes into account four conditions supposed to interact with each other, i.e. the degree of federalism of a policy project, its degree of Europeanization, its policy type (i.e. direct vs. indirect coercion), and the openness of the pre-parliamentary phase of the decision-making process. In order to assess the importance of these conditions, I compare the 11 most important decision-making processes in Switzerland between 2001 and 2006 by a Fuzzy-Set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA). Results suggest that Europeanization or an open pre-parliamentary phase lead to a power structure of dominance, whereas only a specific combination of all four conditions is able to explain power structures of challenge. I argue that this is good news for the integration capacity of the Swiss political system