Gregory A. Fossedal, Direct Democracy in Switzerland, 2002.

8

Parliament

At a glance, the Swiss parliament appears ill suited to govern any country, let alone one with the administrative, linguistic, and economic complexities of Switzerland.

Its members are numerous, and therefore, less remarkable as a group. For every million Swiss citizens, there are about forty members of the lower house of parliament; for every one million Americans, two members of Congress. This tends to reduce the prestige surrounding a citizen's holding seat in the legislature in Bern and also, by sheer rules of arithmetic, reduces the level of erudition of the group that is able to secure election closer to the societal mean. Most of the members are not particularly smooth in either appearance or speech.

"The debates," as Bryce noted in the 1920s, "are practical but not particularly distinguished." During a dozen or so sessions in the fall of 1998 and spring of 1999, one observed perhaps a quarter of the male members in well-cut suits of wool or some other natural material; about half in synthetics and knits with bad ties and shoes; and perhaps a quarter in blue jeans, corduroy-jacket combinations, sweaters, and the like.

It's common to talk with a Swiss for more than an hour -- and in my case, most conversations quickly reached the subject of the political economy and culture -- only to happen upon the fact that one's counterpart was a member of the national or cantonal legislature. In two long luncheon meetings, Franz Muheim never mentioned that he had been a member of the Swiss Senate from Uri. The "Who's Who" of Switzerland lists only a fraction of the current members of the two chambers; in America or Europe, only a tiny number of members (or even former members) would be so omitted. Asked to name a single important bill from Swiss history, such as "the Jackson Amendment," "Glass-Steagal," or "Kemp Roth," most Swiss, even the well read, cannot do so.

Switzerland's legislature meets four times a year for a period of three weeks, so the individual and collective expertise of its members on any issue are highly limited. Debates in the chamber are competent and businesslike, but seldom stirring or memorable, or even particularly clever or media grabbing like those in the U.S. Congress or House of Commons. The deliberations of the two chambers bear a faint resemblance to the pace and logistics of a meeting of the United Nations General Assembly. Although most members have some competence in two or more of the country's four official languages, some do not, and by law, individuals at such proceedings have a right to speak in any of the country's three official tongues.

As a whole, the body is respected, even revered. The Swiss make occasional jokes about their parliament, particularly the lack of special qualification or expertise by some of its members, or the presence of "so many lawyers," though in fact there are fewer attorneys than in most democratic assemblies. But the comments are of a "gentle wit," as Beatrice puts it in Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, "stimulating without harming." Toward the individual members, in general, there is a tremendous affection. Visiting with a parliamentarian in his or her home town, one generally observes that they are known and liked. It is not the power worship or respect that would be given to a British MP, still less to a United States Senator. There is, however, a familial affection.

"We have to like the parliament, in a sense," as a newspaper editor told me, "because our parliament is us." It reflects, more than any other parliament, the people who elect it, and it enacts -- especially given the many popular checks on it -- laws that are closer to the heart and spirit of its people than in any other nation. For an individual, achieving a seat in the lower or even upper chamber is not on the level of distinction of other Western democracies. Members and former members make no fuss about their titles, and normally are not addressed as such. A Swiss who was a member of parliament and has a Ph.D. is nearly always referred to as "Doctor" -- not "Congressman" or "Senator." When one Swiss person describes the achievements of another who spent some years in the legislature, it is not uncommon for them to completely omit the fact of their having served there -- not by way of demeaning the body or the person's service there, but simply because it is not necessarily considered as important as their achievements in their business, their community, and their family. The reciprocal result, however, is that the Swiss feel perhaps less alienated from their politicians than the voters of any other country.

The election rules that produce these parliaments are also a mass of seeming contradictions. There are no federal term limits (at least one canton has a ten-year cap), and members enjoy a very high rate of reelection. Yet they generally step down after a period of ten or so years, being taken up with other pursuits. In many Western countries, the pattern is the opposite: Many politicians loudly proclaim the virtues of limited terms, yet decline to step down themselves after years in office.

The Swiss spend little on campaigns. For a seat in the national legislature, they consider any amount over $50,000 spent by one candidate to be excessive, and this invisible ceiling is punctured only rarely. For the cantonal legislatures, $5,000 or less per candidate is the norm. This compares to races in the millions for the U.S. Congress and state legislatures. Yet Switzerland has no limits on how much a candidate can spend, and none either on how much an individual can give to a candidate. Despite the seeming opportunities offered for even a small amount of money to influence the political system, the Swiss are plagued by few of the scandals and corruption that plague Washington, London, or Tokyo. In the early 1980s, a member of the federal counsel, the Swiss executive, was caught up in a financial scandal. She had alerted her husband to a pending investigation of a company on whose board he sat. The call in which she did so was leaked to the press. She resigned quietly in a manner of days.

"It is free," James Bryce wrote in Modern Democracies, "from even the suspicion of being used for private gain." The statement remains true today. Yet there are few checks of the type that in more corrupt states are deemed essential merely to restrain marginally the force of legislative malfeasance. Swiss members of the Congress fill out no forms disclosing their income and holdings, and release no tax records. Even their campaign spending is a private affair. .Candidates normally (as a practice, not a legal requirement) report totals to the party but not the public. Nor are such figures leaked to journalists.

"There would not be a great need for those types of ethics laws here," as Hugo Butler, the editor of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung commented, "because any question of corruption could immediately be remedied by the people," a reference to the referendum system, "and because there is a general respect for the parliament and its members as honest and just. For the Swiss, the parliament is us, a reflection of the people themselves." For that reason, it is difficult to quantify certain activities for comparison to other countries.

The Swiss have no federal term-limits on legislative seats, and although the turnover rate in the legislature is relatively low, they have few complaints about the difficulty of removing an occasional member who does not perform. "Our members of parliament tend to get reelected because they do a good job," as Christian Kuoni, a leading businessman, put it. "If they were not liked, people would not vote for them."

Who are the legislators, and how do they work? More than one-fifth are women: forty-four of 200 members in the lower chamber in 1998, and eight out of forty-six in the upper chamber. The most common profession among these members is lawyers, but this is true of only about one-third of the members, as opposed to half or more in a typical Western congress or parliament. A number of business executives serve, more than 15 percent in fact. This is down from perhaps more than a third in, say, the 1960s, owing both to the increasing demands of parliament and of business. A number of union leaders, teachers, doctors, and housewives also serve.

This diversity of professions has a number of important impacts. Naturally, the debates and discussion of the Swiss assembly are less precise and correct legally than one might expect among the more specialized legislatures of other developed countries. This renders the whole tone and art of governing somewhat rougher, less precise, and less bureaucratic -- with advantages and disadvantages. Combined with the fact that there are six or seven parties represented, as well as the fact that Swiss's highly federalist structure refers many issues down to the cantonal and even communal level, the result is that a meeting of the Swiss assembly often has the feel of a city council. The discussions on the floor and in the chamber have the flavor, not of a separate society of persons all expert in the business of lawmaking, but of professionals and workers from different fields, all with different kinds of expertise. There is here more than any other legislature the sense less of a separate clique or society, and more of a chance assemblage of different persons, and a slice of the broader society at large.

During one session, the presiding officer of the Senate happened to notice an acquaintance up in the galleries. Without any great disruption in the proceedings, he called for one of his colleagues, a woman, to please take the chair, walked out the back of the room, and within a few seconds was up in the visitor's gallery to deliver a little briefing to his friends. Just as seamlessly, when the debate suddenly neared completion and it was time for a vote on a series of amendments, he got up and left.

The proceedings that day, by the way, were not some trivial vote on a nonbinding resolution or the like. (There are very few such resolutions in the Swiss parliament, by the way. "We have too much work to do in the time we have," as a member explained to me matter-of-factly in the outer chamber.) In fact, the Swiss were in the midst of a fiscal crisis. "All we have to do is cut a few billion francs," Carlo Schmid, a respected Senator from Appenzell, explained. Then again, this amounted to about 5 percent of the Swiss budget. Amounts of that sort have been sufficient to bring down parliamentary governments in other Western democracies and, at the very least, to produce a great outcry in the United States, with bitter discussions lasting until the wee hours of December 30. The Swiss, who in ten days were about to choose two new federal council members -- in effect, two future presidents, and one-third of their executive branch -- wrapped the whole discussion up in a few days, voted, and closed the budget gap with little fuss or fanfare.

The Swiss chambers thus operate in an atmosphere of relaxed seriousness. They form a true popular assembly, a people's parliament, which reflects and embodies the basic character of the nation itself. Much of this, as has been observed, flows from the broader political system that empowers popular wisdom. But there are particular rules and policies that play their role as well, operating themselves consistent with the broader political structure. It would be wrong to think that merely by copying these minor provisions, one would achieve the same spirit; but it would be equally wrong to ignore the demo-cratic-republican spirit that pervades the Swiss legislature.

Approaching the Bundeshaus, a building of worn stones in the Georgian style that backs to a view of the River Aare, one sees indications almost immediately that this is a special kind of legislature. A public parking lot, no more than fifty feet from the main entrance, bustles with the cars of citizens. Up a simple set of stairs is a set of huge, beautiful double doors. Members of parliament come and go, leaving an outsider to wonder where the entrance is for "visitors" or the "general public." But here there is no great sociological gulf between the people and their representatives. "The entrance," explains a somewhat bemused woman in French, "is here," pointing to the obvious door a few feet in front of us.

Entering the parliament one sometimes encounters not a single guard (there are guards, but they often sit unobtrusively in one of two entry chambers to the side). There are no metal detectors or briefcase scanners. A group of two or three nice ladies, approximately forty to sixty years of age, generally approve your pass for the day. Usually, if one is going in to visit with a member of parliament, the parliamentary member will come down to meet the visitor. Up two broad flights of stairs -- no special elevators for members -- and one passes through a long, old-fashioned-type communal press room with big wooden tables and ample seating, but no special desks belonging to individual reporters.

Behind the press room was a wide, semicircular hallway, perhaps thirty feet wide and 200 long. Every fifteen feet or so on the inner side of the arc was a door feeding into one of the two legislative chambers. This archway served as a kind of grand lobby for members to hold meetings, make telephone calls (usually on a cell phone), and conduct other business. It was also, however, the office for most of the members. The typical parliamentarian has only a shared desk in this outer commons area, or at best, a cubbyhole at his party's office nearby. There are no paid staff, no special barber shops for members. Members generally eat in a cafeteria along with other members, visitors, and employees from the library and other government offices housed at the Bundeshaus.

As we sat in the cafeteria one morning, two members nominated for the federal council (the seven-member presidency) walked in. They were treated with respect, and a certain notoriety, but there was nothing out of the ordinary. In fact, they addressed several nonmembers of parliament by name, and carried on a conversation with them about the issue being debated that morning in the Senate. As in Swiss courts, in the great Swiss corporations, or on a Swiss sidewalk, there is a low-key absence of officiousness, and a constant emphasis on building a popular consensus.

This absence of pomp is not merely symbolic, and does not merely effect chance conversations or relationships in a cafeteria. The nature of the system helps promote this relaxed atmosphere among legislators. After all, there is little chance of sneaking any important measure into Swiss law by dint of a clever evasion or a raw-power parliamentary maneuver. There are too many checks. Policies are changed by people, elections are constant.

Senator Pat Moynihan once described the error of many Americans in thinking its legislators work by the "consent of the governed." In fact, as Moynihan aptly noted, they operate as they wish unless the people object. The same theme is woven through the memoirs of the late Tip O'Neill, Man of the House. The distinction is critical. As elections take place once every two years for the House, and every six for the Senate, there are few opportunities to object. And these are diluted by the fact that each member will have cast hundreds of votes. The voters, then, consent not directly to the thousands of small acts a government will commit, but to an amalgamated track record, a great average, for their own representative.

Among the Swiss parliamentarians, there is a kind of despair about the utility or possibility of manipulating other elites for political gain: What would be the point? That "despair," of course, is another way of saying, healthy respect for and orientation toward the people. Politics, then, is less tactical, more substantive. There are, interestingly, fewer appeals to "the people," and still less to opinion polls, than in a typical Western democratic assembly. In these, the regular citation of the people shows in a certain way that the people are taken into account, but also, that their voice will not automatically be heard. For many votes and issues, the people will never have a direct voice; hence their voice must be leveraged, inferred, or "brought into the discussion." In the Swiss assembly, there is a constant, pervasive knowledge that on anything controversial, the people will, willy-nilly, have the final say anyway. They are no more cited or appealed to than the air we breathe; they are simply there.

As for opinion polls in particular, there are remarkably few of them, and the Swiss of all walks of life hold them in contempt. "Polls reflect what men and women think when they are telephoned late at night and asked to spout off an opinion about something they may have no influence over," as one parliamentarian put it. "It is not the same as when you ask citizens to decide what the country will do: Then there is an informed choice, made in a serious and deliberative manner."

The parliamentary bodies also appear -- based on attending some eight to ten sessions, over a period of several months, and reviewing press accounts of the proceedings going back a century -- to be significantly less partisan. Debates are no less lively as to the ideas and principles involved, but less rancorous and accusative regarding alleged matters of personal or party bias. This probably has less to do with any of the particular legislators, or even the rules directly affecting the chamber, than with the general "spirit of the laws" which results from the Swiss system of direct democracy and culture of consensus.

In many democracies, the way one changes policies -- often, the only way for major changes -- is to win an election and with it a "mandate." The losing party is thus expelled from office, and begins its effort as the minority to defeat its opponent. Even where the individuals in this system are highly public spirited -- as they usually are -- the system itself brings them into constant conflict. There are many gains to be had by enmeshing this opponent in a scandal, or finding a way to neutralize that opponent with a clever parliamentary device. And, such change by realignment, with win-ner-take-all implications, tends to take place only periodically. To "lose the Congress," as the Republicans did in 1954 or the Democrats in 1994 in the United States, typically means at least five to ten years in the wilderness, and usually longer.

In the Swiss system, with so many controversial issues being referred to the people, there are many ways to achieve change without a single office holder losing his or her seat. The gains of defeating another party, particularly if it is by dint of some merely clever device of communications or investigative skill, are correspondingly minor. The popular orientation does not eliminate the competition over ideas; indeed, it heightens it. It tends to make party and personality a smaller factor, however. In the Swiss system, to gain such a minor advantage, even in the short run, would be roughly as important as winning the right to speak first or last in a debate or to sit on the right or left side of the room in the legislature. Such matters may matter, but in a world of finite time and resources, they are not what a prudent statesman spends his energy on.

Respect is obvious when listening to the Swiss people talk about their legislature, particularly as part of the broader system of government. Even more noticeable, however, is the respect of the lawmakers for the Swiss people. A Western politician who is defeated at the polls or who simply cannot get a particular message he desires passed into law will instinctively blame some flaw in the system, the people, or even the press -- drawing any conclusion, almost, except the one that their initial idea itself was flawed. "We didn't do a good job of communicating what we wanted to do with this bill," is a common explanation. "Our message didn't get out," usually because of the 'special interests." Sometimes the low opinion of the voters is stated straightforwardly, as in Senator Jack Danforth's 1984 proclamation that "the problem with this congress is that it is too responsive to the will of the people." Normally it is couched in more indirect terms, but the underlying assumption that the voters cannot sort out the demagogic appeals of others remains.

Swiss politicians take aim more often not at the messenger or their opponents, but at themselves. Andreas Gross is a well-known member of parlia-ment and an author. He came to prominence by sponsoring an initiative to abolish the Swiss militia system of near-universal male service. If anything, one would expect an articulate and cosmopolitan member of parliament like Gross to have a certain stubbornness about admitting a mistake, and a great facility to explain how his ideas had only been thwarted by the Rich, the Military, the Press, or some other cadre. Instead, when asked what he thought of the initiative system given its rejection of his proposal some years ago, Gross said simply, "It is a good system -- the best anyone has found. The people rejected our initiative, and therefore, it was wrong." When this happens, Gross continued, "you have to look at your own proposal again, see where you may have gone wrong."

Parliament's special character and reputation are partly the results of social factors and mores that can only be created through indirect measures over much time. Others, however, are the result of policy. These are not necessarily deliberate: The constitutional debates of 1848 and 1874, for example, give little evidence that the Swiss framers were setting out to produce these effects. They are, nevertheless, real results traceable of the acts of statesmen -- not merely volcanoes or lightning bolts or other natural accidents.

One such effect is the result of the pay for members of the Swiss parliament, which is low compared to the rest of the developed world -- as Table 8.1 indicates. The austere salaries are mirrored, or even exceeded, by the lean staff and perk structure. In the United States, even a junior member of Congress typically enjoys staff, office, and other privileges in the amount of $800,000 and up. This does not count the huge resources available to him directly through the ability to compel work by dozens of congressional agencies. Even in France and Germany, where the measurable legislative structure is more lean due to the parliamentary nature of the government, staff budgets dwarf those of the Swiss. The government provides no separate office to speak of, and no personal staff. The typical Swiss parliamentarian shares an office, if that, at the party office within the capital. His cubbyhole resembles that of a congressional staffer in the United States.

One obvious impact of this low pay, in combination with the related factors mentioned, is that the Swiss regard service in that body as a real sacrifice. It is not as though the pay is so high in other legislatures that the money involved becomes a powerful magnet, drawing the most talented and ambitious to compete for the money involved. But neither, in combination with all the power and perks that attend to a position in the French or British parliament, or the American house or senate, can anyone pretend that membership there is anything but a boon to most of the members.

The impacts of this policy, or tendency, toward low pay for the members of parliament are not merely a matter of avoiding certain ills (e.g., reducing the lust to hold such office among the merely ambitious). It has positive effects as well. The notion that service in parliament is an act of citizenship has created a tolerant attitude among most employers toward the service of their members in that body. This, also combined with other factors -- such as the campaign financing restraint -- enables the Swiss parliament to achieve a much broader cross section of professional, racial, and cultural representation. It is important to note that Switzerland has moved somewhat in the direction of a more professional parliament and other functions of government in the last twenty-five years, a change some bemoan as insufficient, and some as having gone too far already. A mild reaction against this trend has set in. It is possible that the 1990s were a high-water mark of the professional politician, just as it is possible the trend will continue.

The citizen system has also probably played a role in the facility with which women have been able to move so quickly into the political structure in Switzerland. (Their presence is all the more remarkable if we recall that women did not even win the vote until a 1971 referendum.) "As a housewife on a farm, I have hardly enough time for the responsibilities in the legislature," as a member of the St. Gallen cantonal legislature told me. (The legislature meets ten weeks a year, about the same as the national parliament in Bern, but there are committee meetings and mountains of reading.)

The vast majority of parliamentarians keep their regular jobs, whether as homemaker or wage earner, at least to some extent, during the forty weeks of the year they are not in session. The result would be a conflict-of-interest nightmare under the extensive ethics-protection law common in other democracies. This disadvantage is compensated, however, by the culture of no-nonsense work that results. The Swiss parliament consists of citizens who live not with separate members' pension and health plans, special entrances and parking places and other perks, but will in fact be back at their workplace living under the laws they have created within a few weeks.

The Swiss system of government literally "by the people," from the community volunteers up to the national parliament, has not proven immune to erosion. The lament of Fran?ois Loeb, a member of parliament who owns a prosperous department store chain, is typical: "I am able to maintain my business and take an active part in the assembly because my business is in good enough shape for me to be absent from time to time, and to delegate work to a competent staff. Not all the members are in that position, which means that their work in the parliament or their business must suffer, or both." Loeb worries that service in the parliament may become affordable only to the privileged in the future. So far, however, the Swiss penchant for moderation in campaign expenditures has helped prevent the legislature from becoming an aristocracy. The sons of former presidents and congressmen have fared better in the American electoral system with its spending and contribution limits than they have in Switzerland with its relatively lax rules, but public austerity. Anywhere the threat of a concentration of power raises its head, especially a political one, the Swiss instinctively react to bring matters under control.

There is a cost to the Swiss practice of giving scant economic support to its lawmakers. This was visible during visits to parliament in 1998 and 1999, as several of the more impressive members felt compelled to return to their private profession or business. The result is to deprive the Swiss people of the experience and intelligence of some of its more capable public servants. This turnover, on the other hand, has positive aspects. It enlivens the two chambers with periodic infusions of new energy. The impact, in combination with other factors, is to simulate something of the results sought by the device of term limits in some countries but without the imposition of a direct elite veto upon the man or woman who would otherwise be selected by the people.

Nearly as important as the parliament's lean budget is its limited calendar, which works in combination with these other matters to preserve the deliberate amateur quality of the legislature. Meeting only ten to twelve weeks a year, the legislators have little excuse to avoid centering their lives in their home district and, lacking the resources for the most part, only a few of them are able to become full-time socialites in Bern.

Likewise, the sheer numerousness of the representatives, in relative terms, helps keep the body from degenerating into arrogance. At 240 members with seven million people, the Swiss ratio of representation is the equivalent of a U.S. Congress expanded from its present membership of 535 to some 18,000. This is not a trivial effect. It renders the entire system more accessible, and thus reinforces the objective of maintaining a people's government that so many other Swiss institutions also strive to preserve. By diffusing power, it renders the legislature less vulnerable to manipulation, whether by wealth, particular interests in the press, or by other pressures.

'There is almost no lobbying," Bryce wrote, and this remains largely true today. One strives to find listings of firms even resembling lobbyists in the Bern telephone directory. Associations of employers and labor unions, indus-tries, environmentalists, and other groups exist but bear little resemblance to their counterparts in Washington, D.C. Many of these offices did not even employ a single full-time lobbyist, where their U.S. or European counterpart would typically have a whole battery of them. The sheer size of Switzerland, to be sure, plays a role in this, as does its relatively small federal government. Wary of the dangers of power and privilege, Jean-Jaques Rousseau, the French philosopher who proudly signed most of his manuscripts "a citizen of Geneva," once suggested that republics move their capital periodically -- disrupting the cozy inertia and special relationships that tend to build up in any governing city. The combined policies of the Swiss toward their legislature have some of the impact of that, at less cost.

Underlying all these effects, of course, is the system of initiative and referendum that affects the Swiss political economy, and in a sense the whole culture, so broadly. This system is often described, even by the Swiss, as a kind of negative check upon the other political institutions. It is certainly that. It is, however, more than that. It creates a spiritual bond, and a sense of responsibility by the people -- turning them all, in effect, into part-time legislators since in their many votes each year they wind up functioning in precisely that manner.

In the Swiss parliament, the influence of direct democracy can be seen by a whole sociology of popular orientation. Each member of the assembly thinks of himself as a teacher, and a teacher of the whole nation of citizens. No teacher who holds his pupils in contempt will succeed, or even stay long on the job; hence the pedagogical impulse, healthy and strong to begin with, is reinforced. As well, a teacher with any wisdom soon realizes he has much to learn from his pupils. The instruction is no longer one way -- particularly when the classroom is an intelligent one like the Swiss people, and the teacher a humble, part-time instructor who thinks himself a citizen, not a sovereign.

Thus, to attempt to transplant merely the policies that directly govern "parliament" itself, such as campaign finance or pay and staff provisions, to other democracies, might produce disappointing results if done without establishing some kind of initiative and referendum system, or other arrangements that would emulate its effects. One can make an excellent case for reforming the U.S. or the European legislatures even if only by means of some of those narrower measures. They would not, however, work in exactly the same way as in Switzerland, for there, every political relationship is subtly changed by the system of direct democracy.

It may be that the other democracies, given how far their institutions are from this populist faith in the wisdom of the electorate, must limit themselves to cruder measures. Or that to reach a state of refinement as great as the Swiss model, that they would have to pass through intermediary stages in which the faculty of popular voting and control could be built up gradually.

In a sense, the roots go deeper even than the practice of national and cantonal referendum. The Swiss institution of direct democracy, after all, stretches back over time, and at the same time is brought forward in the continuation of the ancient popular assemblies.

Carlo Schmid-Sutter, who has served in the national senate, has a grasp on the Swiss conception when he describes the Landsgemeinde as "the incarnation of the state, the place where all the citizens come together to act as a community." No representative assembly, however virtuous, can ever exactly capture that sensation. The Swiss, though, have achieved an unusually close approximation, in their parliament of citizens.