Putting the Special Case in Its Place: Switzerland and Small‐N Comparison in Policy Research |
| |
| Authors: | Marie‐Christine Fontana Alexandre Afonso Yannis Papadopoulos |
| |
| Institution: | 1. University of Lausanne;2. Marie‐Christine Fontana is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Lausanne. She works on a project within the National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) “Challenges to Democracy in the 21st century”, funded by the Swiss Science Foundation, and she writes her dissertation on the impact of Europeanisation on decision‐making processes in small consociational States.;3. Alexandre Afonso is a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, and is a member of the National Centre of Competence in Research on Democracy, University of Zurich. His areas of interest are comparative political economy, social concertation, labour mobility and social policies.;4. Yannis Papadopoulos is Professor of Public Policy at the Institute of Political and International studies, University of Lausanne. |
| |
| Abstract: | This research note presents a set of strategies to conduct small‐N comparisons in policy research including the Swiss case. Even though every country can be considered “special” to some extent, the Swiss political system is often viewed as a particularly difficult case for comparison because of the impact of its idiosyncratic institutional features (most notably direct democracy). In order to deal with this problem, our note sets out two possible strategies ‐ the use of functional equivalents and of counterfactual reasoning ‐ and explains how to implement them empirically through process tracing and the establishment of causal chains. As an illustration, these strategies are used for a comparison of the process of electricity market liberalisation in Switzerland and Belgium. |
| |
| Keywords: | Switzerland Comparison Functional Equivalence Counterfactual Reasoning Process Tracing |
|
|
