Is there a ‘constitutional moment’in contemporary Europe? What if anything is the constitution of theEuropean Union; what kind of polity is the Union? The suggestionoffered is that there is a legally constituted order, and that asuitable term to apply to it is a‘commonwealth’, comprising a commonwealthof ‘post-sovereign’ states. Is it a democraticcommonwealth, and can it be? Is there sufficiently ademos or ‘people’ for democracy to be possible?If not democratic, what is it? Monarchy, oligarchy, ordemocracy, or a ‘mixed constitution’? Argued: thereis a mixed constitution containing a reasonableelement of democratic rule. The value of democracy isthen explored in terms of individualistic versusholistic evaluation and instrumental versus intrinsicvalue. Subsidiarity can be considered in a similarlight, suggestively in terms of forms of democracyappropriate to different levels of self-government.The conclusion is that there is no absolute democraticdeficit in the European commonwealth.
Switzerland is a laggard in terms of digital campaigning. Direct democratic votes, more particularly, are centered around issues and little personalized. Combined with the specificities of voters’ information behaviour in direct democratic campaigns, these features are likely to disincentivize political actors from extensively campaigning online. Instead, we expect political actors to continue relying on traditional media. These propositions are tested on a large data base of social media posts and newspaper advertisements published before direct democratic votes held in Switzerland from 1981 to 2020 and 2010 to 2020, respectively. Counterintuitively, this research note finds a strong discontinuity in campaign communication practices. Over the past decades, and between 2010 and 2020 in particular, newspaper ads have become less central to direct democratic campaign communication. At the same time, political actors are increasingly shifting their communication to the digital sphere. 相似文献
This paper compares the development of the Japanese political economy regime and its repercussions for the party system with the, at least at first sight, contrasting case of Switzerland. Rather than pointing out the differences between the two countries, the comparison emphasizes the similarities: both countries are involved in a comparable regime shift, which has its origins in similar domestic structural and cultural shifts as well as in changes in the world economy. In both countries, the mismatch between the socioeconomic realities and the political configurations has been widening for many years. Since the early nineties, the much needed realignment in the party systems has gotten underway in Japan as well as in Switzerland, but it has not yet reached a new equilibrium. In Switzerland, however, the restructuring of the party system has proceeded more steadily and has gone farther than in Japan 相似文献
