Winners and losers in Swiss legislative decision-making. The role of institutions and power

Transcription

1 Winners and losers in Swiss legislative decision-making. The role of institutions and power first draft, prepared for the annual meeting of the Swiss Political Science Association 2010 Denise Traber Abstract This paper investigates the determinants of preference attainment in Swiss policy-making. It distinguishes between institution-specific and actorspecific factors. More specifically, it examines the impact of participation and reputation and hypothesizes that both have a considerable impact on an actors s ability to get the outcome he desires. The analysis is based on data for 11 legislative processes in various policy domains. The hypotheses are tested in several multi-level models which indicate that neither reputation nor participation have a direct effect on preference attainment. However, a strong interaction effect was found: actors with high reputation who are at the same time highly involved in the decision-making processes appear to be the most successful. 1

2 1 Introduction Consociational democracies are often said to have greater capacities for integration than majority systems (Lijphart 1969, Schmidt 1995, Lehner & Widmaier 2002). Complex and time-consuming bargaining processes supposedly guarantee for comprehensive interest integration, which increases political and social stability but also transaction costs (Buchanan & Tullock 2004 (1962)). In Switzerland consociational bargaining interacts with direct democracy: After a final vote in parliament, a popular referendum is called if a group manages to collect signatures against the law within 100 days. The literature generally assumes that the referendum has changed the institutions of legislative decision-making in Switzerland. Societal actors which are known to be powerful enough to call for a popular referendum are granted access to the early stages of the decision-making process, in order to account for their interests and thereby to minimize the risk of a failure of a law (Neidhart 1970). Representatives of various interest associations take part in expert groups, and an official consultation procedure gives groups and individuals the possibility to voice their preferences during the drafting stages of a law. It is however not clear whether this practice leads to an equal representation of societal interests in the policy outcomes. On the one hand, it is relatively undisputed that in Swiss democracy all societal actors have equal rights of participation and realistic chances that their concerns will be accounted for (e.g. Lehner 1993, Linder 2005). On the other hand, many authors assume that the complex pre-parliamentary bargaining mainly supports those groups that dispose of large financial resources and maintain strong ties with parties, while minority interests are generally marginalized (Kriesi 1980, Papadopoulos 1997, Armingeon 2002). This paper investigates the deterpreferredminants of preference attainment in Swiss policy-making. Do institutional aspects, that is, access to the decisionmaking process, matter for preference attainment, and to what degree? How important are group-specific attributes such as reputation and group type? Preference attainment or success is defined as obtaining the preferred outcome, and it is assumed that all actors have ideal points on a legislative proposal and try to move the positions of the decision-makers towards their preferred outcome. Moreover, it is assumed that the type and intensity of an actors activity to obtain the preferred outcome depends on the importance of an issue for this actor. In his famous study on decision-making and elite networks in Swiss politics of the 1970s, Kriesi (1980) concluded that the political system is dominated by a narrow core of closely linked individuals and organizations, mainly the 2

3 center right parties and the peak organizations of the business interest groups (or their representatives). In the meantime, however, new actors have arisen. The new social movements led to a multiplication of societal organizations and might have empowered the left parties to a certain degree (the green party is now a serious member of parliament). Moreover, certain changes in the field of economic policy led to a further fragmentation of business interest groups, which puts their formerly dominant position into question (Kriesi & Trechsel 2008, 110ff.). Besides changes in the actor configuration, various scholars argue that the style of decision-making might have changed, due to mediatization and internationalization of Swiss politics (Kriesi, Bühlmann, Lars-Eric, Esser, Merkel & Papadopoulos 2007, Sciarini 2006). However, besides studies on specific policy domains (e.g. Fischer 2005, Kriesi & Jegen 2001) and recent studies on voting in parliament (Schwarz & Linder 2006, Linder & Schwarz 2008) there is no recent empirical account on preference attainment in Swiss policy-making. This paper takes a broad perspective and includes various policy domains, in order to asses general mechanisms of preference attainment. The analysis is based on data for 11 legislative processes between 2001 and It uses a salience-weighted measure for preference attainment, a reputational measure and various participation variables. The data stems from over 150 face-to face interviews with representatives of parties, interest groups and other societal organizations which participated in the policy processes. The article is structured as follows: section 2 provides an overview of the legislative institutions in Switzerland, section 3 presents the relevant literature and derives hypotheses. The following section introduces the data and operationalization. Section 4 discusses the analysis and the main results and section 5 concludes. 2 The legislative process in Switzerland Most of the time the decision-making process in Swiss politics is described as consensual, in the sense that it is inclusive and focuses on extensive bargaining among different groups of society. This type of decision-making was originally explained by consociational theory as a solution for culturally segmented societies to deal with problems of political stability (Lijphart 1969). Neidhart (1970) offered an alternative explanation when he related the consociational pattern of decision-making to direct democracy. He argued that the sword of 3

4 Damocles of direct democracy forced public actors to include private groups into the decision-making process in order to prevent a popular vote, which could possibly lead to the failure of a parliamentary decision. Hence, consultation and bargaining between public and private actors at a very early stage of the process became a necessity. The very complex and time-consuming preparliamentary stage developed as a means to include those powerful groups and organizations that are capable and willing to make use of the referendum. This is still reflected in the institutional structure of legislative decision-making in Switzerland. After the initiation of a process, a first draft of a legislative text is elaborated within the office in charge or in expert groups. This text is then submitted to a public discussion (Vernehmlassung). The most important organizations will be approached directly by the administration, but any private body is allowed to formulate their position on the subject. The consultation procedure as well as the expert groups are important elements of consensus democracy. First of all, they are means of inclusion, as they open up the decision-making process to private actors. Some stages are accessible for everybody, which together with the direct democracy considerably contributes to the legitimacy of political decisions in Switzerland. Second, the various actors participating in expert groups and the consultation procedure provide state actors with important information on their policy positions as well as with expert knowledge, which might have been lacking among the bureaucracy due to scarce personal resources. Finally, the pre-parliamentary stages are also instruments of control: the state tries to evaluate the preferences of the most important actors, in order to prevail in the decision-making and to prevent an eventual failure of the negotiations. As for the parliamentary phase, the perfect bicameralism of the Swiss political system is usually described as a further instrument to foster consensus, since both chambers have to agree on all aspects of a law (see Sciarini 2006). If one or several issues cannot be decided on (the decision of the first chamber is rejected by the second chamber), a conciliation conference (Einigungskonferenz) is established after two turns between the chambers (see Schwarz 2008). The two chambers subsequently vote on suggestions of the conciliation conference; if they are rejected, the law fails. However, this is rarely the case in Swiss politics. Most of the time, the members of parliament manage to agree even on the most contested issues. Again, this could be explained by strong direct democracy: parties may agree on a law in the parliamentary arena even if they disapprove one or several aspects of the law, because there is always the possibility of a referendum. Hence, the legislative process in Switzerland does not end with 4

5 the parliamentary decision. A large part of legislative acts is submitted to a popular referendum, which can be mandatory or facultative. The facultative referendum grants all citizens a say in legislation if signatures are collected within 100 days after the law s publication in the federal law gazette. 3 Preference attainment in Swiss legislative decision-making 3.1 The role of institutions: access and preference attainment Political systems are often characterized according to their system of interest representation, that is, they are aligned on a continuum which leads from competition to concordance (or majority to consensus). Thereby it is generally acknowledged that the more inclusive a system of interest representation, the more equally societal interests are represented. These equal chances for every group in society to participate in the political process and to be heard have a strong legitimizing function (Abromeit 1993). To analyze and compare polities, the party system and the system of interest groups are often examined separately. Several questions seem to be of major importance, mainly whether parties or interest groups are dominant in the political process, how and whether these two types of groups cooperate and how powerful regional actors are in the polity (ibid.). Switzerland is known to have a strong federal system, where the cantons have many political competences. Parties are traditionally considered to be rather weak compared to interest groups. The party system is fragmented and regional parties (or regional strands of major parties) have for a long time been more important than their national organizations (Kriesi & Trechsel 2008, 84 pp.). Compared to Swiss interest groups and parties in other western democracies, Swiss parties have only limited financial and personal resources, partly due to the lack of state funding, which is related to the militia system in parliament. According to Kriesi and Trechsel (ibid.: 96), the Swiss party system of today consists of three camps: the left, a moderate right and the nationalistconservative right, which can be placed in a two-dimensional space. On the first dimension, the left opposes the right camp, on the second, the cultural dimension, the conservative defenders of Swiss traditions oppose the culturally liberal parties. The weakness of political parties in Switzerland stands in stark contrast to the importance of interest groups. Among them, it is mainly the business interest associations who have for a long time played an important 5

6 role in Swiss policy-making (Linder 2005, Kriesi & Trechsel 2008). One of the peak organizations, economiesuisse, provides the lion s share of financing in referendum campaigns, and most business interest associations maintain close relationships with the parties in parliament quite a few MPs are directors of a business interest association or are members of a directors board. According to the literature, the importance of interest groups in Switzerland is mainly due to the institutions of direct democracy. According to Neidhart s (1970) famous hypothesis, the institutions of direct democracy place a sword of Damocles over the decision-making process. All organizations that are capable of making a referendum threat are likely to be integrated in early stages of the process. As a consequence, Swiss political institutions are particularly open for various political actors (Kriesi & Trechsel 2008, 110; Linder 2005, 123). It is however not clear, whether and to what degree this easy access to the political process leads to an equal representation of interests in the policy outcome. What is more, only a few studies provide empirical material on the dimensions of access of different groups to different stages of the decision-making process (Fischer, Nicolet & Sciarini 2002, Fischer 2005, Kriesi 1980, Sciarini, Fischer & Nicolet 2004). It is commonly understood that the pre-parliamentary stages of the process are the most important access points for societal organizations and groups. In these stages of the process non-state actors participate actively in expert groups, negotiation and consultation procedures. The literature further assumes that policies are shaped at these stages of the process, and are in most instances not changed dramatically anymore in parliament (Jegher 1999, Kriesi 1980, Sciarini 2006). The first hypothesis therefore assumes that participation in the pre-parliamentary phase might be an important predictor of preference attainment. H1: Participation in the pre-parliamentary stages of the decisionmaking process has a positive impact on a group s preference attainment. The view of the pre-parliamentary phase as the most important arena of the decision-making process has been challenged recently. Häusermann, Mach & Papadopoulos (2004) for example argue for the domain of social policy that corporatist bargaining has become difficult for various reasons, such as retrenchment pressure, polarization and increasing media coverage of the negotiations. With growing conflict between the social partners, it has become almost impossible to find an agreement in the pre-parliamentary phase and the compromise seeking is postponed to the parliamentary arena. Fischer (2005) confirmed 6

7 this view for other cases. Besides growing conflict in corporatist bargaining, the internationalization of Swiss politics is often discussed as an important phenomenon which brings about dramatic changes in Swiss legislation in general and more specifically for the institutions of the decision-making process (Fischer 2005, Sciarini, Nicolet & Fischer 2002). Pre-parliamentary bargaining is cut short, the most important decisions concerning the content of a legislative act or an international treaty are taken in a supra-national context, in arenas which are often not accessible for most actors. To account for these possible changes in the institutional structure of the decision-making process, the second hypothesis considers participation all important stages of the process. H2: Participation in important phases of the decision-making process has a positive impact on a group s preference attainment. 3.2 Power, influence and reputation Besides institutional characteristics of the decision-making process, several groupspecific factors might determine whether a group is successful or not in getting the policy outcome it desires. The most prominently discussed attribute is power. Voting power studies apply concepts of cooperative game theory, i.e. power indices, the two best known being the Shapley/Shubik and the Banzhaf indices. These indices measure each player s potential abilities to change the result alone. The voting power approach has become popular in the context of European Union decision-making and has provided important insight into actors power in voting bodies (see Widgrén 1994). Nevertheless, it cannot generate conclusions on the mechanisms outside formal voting arenas and is therefore not very useful for a perspective that includes all actor groups participating in the decision-making process. Several studies take a broader perspective and account for the mechanisms of power and influence outside formal voting procedures. The DEU research project of (Thomson, Stokman, Achen & König 2006, Stokman & Thomson 2004) tests various formal models of decision-making to assess determinants of the outcome and of the actors success in EU-decision-making. These studies produce interesting results on the bargaining process and actors behavior in bargaining situations, however, the requirements in terms of data are enormous, which makes the research design almost non-applicable for most settings. Various studies have narrowed their focus on interest group influence in the policy process, while influence is sometimes used as dependent and sometimes as 7

8 independent variable (Schneider & Baltz 2003, Michalowitz 2007, Dür 2008a). 1 Thereby, influence is generally understood as an actors ability to shape a decision in line with her preferences (Dür 2008b, 561). Thus, the basic assumption of these studies is that for various reasons (e.g. size and economic resources) certain actors have more leverage than others, which increases the likelihood that they will prevail over others in the course of decision-making (Maloney, Jordan & McLaughlin 1994). However, influence and power are not easy to conceptualize nor easy to measure. Power is one of the most contested concepts in political science. As Dür (2008b, 1220) points out, it can be conceived as property of an actor, as a capability or as a causal concept. And depending on the conceptualization, researchers will either study the actor s resources or the actor s impact on an outcome. In the community power debate of the 1960s and 1970s it was discussed whether power can be measured at all (see for example Dahl 1957), and Bachrachand & Baratz (1962) suggested that power has a second face which is invisible to the researcher. They call this second face power in the nondecision-making process, that is, the power to [...] limit decision-making to relatively non-controversial matters, by influencing community values and political procedures and rituals [...] (949). According to this argument, decision-making institutions are always biased, and some groups have more power than others to maintain this bias, so that decision-making is limited to relatively safe issues (952). This study understands power as a property of an actor, but uses a slightly different concept, namely that of reputation or attributed power. 2 As discussed in the previous chapters, Neidhart (1970) contended that the preferences of an actor which is known to be powerful enough to call a referendum will be taken into account in order to prevent a failure of the law. Groups with high reputation are often large and well-organized groups and dispose of larger financial and personal resources to influence the policy process. Financial resources are important for financing referendum campains and personal resources are essential to acquire expert knowledge, which can be useful when participating in expert groups and consultations or in parliamentary committees. On the other hand, it might not even be of any importance whether a group with high reputation participates in the process. The state actors (or the parliament) might as well just anticipate its preferences. H3: A group s reputation has a positive impact on its preference attainment. 1 For an overview see Dür (2008b) and Potters & Sloof (1996). 2 See as well section 4 for a discussion of tautology problems. 8

9 Finally, Barry (1980) pointed out that sometimes an actor can be lucky and obtain a preferred outcome without ever intervening in the decision-making process. Moreover, it might be useful for some actor to have powerful friends and simply adopt their policy positions. Similarly, Schneider & Baltz (2003, 16) talk about strategic position taking, that is, the adoption of a position close to the median position. To account for this, this analysis includes a control measure for preferences at the beginning of the decision-making process. The principal aim of this article is to study different determinants of success and failure in policy processes. Success or preference attainment is defined as obtaining the preferred outcome, and a direct empirical measure is employed. Moreover, the salience of an issue is taken into account. The study differentiates between institutional and group-specific determinants of success, more specifically, between access to the institutions of the decision-making process and the actors reputation. Both are assumed to have a positive impact on an actors success. Further, the analysis controls for the eventuality that some actors just might be lucky, because their preferences are in line with the majority or with the actors controlling the decision-making process. There is no doubt that the mechanisms of interest representation might differ considerably between different types of actors, notably between parties and interest groups. Economically powerful interest groups might try to buy politicians, while smaller and less organized groups might employ various outside lobbying strategies, when formal access to the political system is not possible, or even to complement formal participation (Maloney, Jordan & McLaughlin 1994, Beyers 2004). 3 Parties on the other hand, have access to the arena where final and binding decisions are taken, which gives them a considerable advantage over interest groups. However, this study assumes that the empirical results, that is the visible relation between participation, reputation and success will be the same for different types of actors, notwithstanding the mechanisms behind. 3 see Potters & Sloof (1996) for a discussion of the relation between individual legislators and interest groups. 9

10 4 Data The data was gathered in a large research project on legislative decision-making in Switzerland between 2001 and 2006 (Sciarini & Serdült 2006). We first conducted a survey among approx. 80 experts of Swiss politics, who had to judge the importance of every legislative project that was subject to popular referendum and was voted upon in parliament between 2001 and 2006 (about 350 projects). For the eleven cases with the highest score, we gathered information on the chronology of the process and further made a list of actors (parties, interest groups, offices, all kinds of organizations...) who participated at one or more stages of the decision-making. For all actors on these lists we tried to find a representative (two for the parties), who was involved in the process. The data was then gathered in face-to-face interviews on the basis of standardized questionnaires. The dependent variable used in this analysis success or preference attainment was constructed in the following way: 4 By means of content analysis of the parliamentary debates and various documents provided by the administration, I determined those issues that were most contested in each decision-making process (for an overview see Appendix). This list of issues was presented to the interview partners who had to answer the following questions for each issue separately: Have the interests of your organization been taken into account? (measure for preference attainment). 5 and How important was this issue for your organization? (measure for salience). 6 It has been pointed out repeatedly, that preference measures should be weighed by salience (Dür 2008b, Thomson et al. 2006). Thus, the measure for preference attainment used in this analysis is a salience-weighted mean of the values for each issue. 7 Two participation measures were constructed, which are based on the interview data: for each of the 11 decision-making processes we had prepared a chronology of all the formal stages in the process. The respondents had to indicate in which stages their organization had participated. Moreover, they had to judge each stage as to whether it was important for the outcome or not. The variable participation in pre-parliamentary phase counts the proportion of the pre-parliamentary stages in which an actor has been involved, and the variable participation in important phases counts the ratio of the important stages 4 This operationalization is inspired by the DEU-project (Thomson et al. 2006). 5 Answer categories: not at all; rather not; rather yes; yes, fully. 6 Answer categories: not important at all; rather unimportant; rather important; very important. 7 The measure for preference attainment was recoded to lie between -1.5 and + 1.5; the measure for salience between 0 and 3. Issues with a salience of 0 were excluded. 10

11 in which an actor participated. A stage was counted as important when more than 50% of the respondents had considered it as important. The date on reputation was also gathered during these interviews but based on a separate questionnaire. We prepared a list of all actors who had participated in at least two of our 11 cases (plus several other actors). This list was shown to the interview partners, who had to name those parties, organizations, offices etc. which had, according to their view, played an important role in Swiss politics between 2001 and 2006 in general. The measure is coded between 0 and 1, 1 meaning that 100% of the respondents had considered this organization as important. As a different questionnaire was used, we tried to make sure that this variable measures an actor s overall reputation, independently of the 11 processes we analyzed beside. Using this measure instead of the process-specific reputation, I might not be able to eliminate a tautology problem, but it is reduced as much as possible with the data at hand. Finally, the actors positions in the consultation procedure were coded to have a measure for the preferences at the beginning of the decision-making process. In the consultation procedure, a first draft of the legislative text is published and organizations, parties and individuals are encouraged to give their opinion on the text. After the consultation is closed, the office in charge prepares a report which summarizes the statements and gives advice on how to amend the text in the further procedure. These reports vary considerably in quality and style. Sometimes it was possible to code the positions in detail, sometimes only information on the general opinion was available. Where detailed statements were provided, I tried to code the positions on the same issues that were used for the construction of the preference attainment measure. Even though we collected data for all actors involved in decision-making, that is, state actors (offices in charge) and non-state actors, this analysis is restricted to non-state actors: parties, interest groups and various societal organizations. The data structure might cause some difficulties: Some actors (mainly parties and peak interest groups) participated in several processes, some actors only in one. 11

12 5 Results 5.1 Preference attainment The first part of this section shows how preference attainment is distributed in Swiss policy making. As explained above, this analysis uses a subjective measure of preference attainment, that is, representatives of all the groups and organizations participating in the legislative process were asked as to what degree their interests had been taken account in the final decision in parliament. Table 1 provides an overview of the mean level of preference attainment in the eleven decision-making processes. The average goes from quite positive to slightly negative, the pension reform, the law on nuclear energy and the law on migration being the lowest in terms of average preference attainment. In these three cases a popular referendum was held after the decision in parliament. The pension reform was voted down by the Swiss population and is since then stuck in the parliamentary debate. As for the law on migration, it is also the case with the largest variance, besides two of the three treaties with the European Union (Free movement of persons and Schengen/Dublin). Relatively uncontested were the constitutional article on education, the treaty on taxation of savings and the law on a infrastructure fund. However, it has to be added with respect to education and the infrastructure fund, that they had been very controversial for a good part of the decision-making process: the law on infrastructure fund was preceded by a referendum defeat, after which the legislative text was revised considerably. The pre-parliamentary process on the article on education had been very conflictual for a long time and a compromise could be found only after the replacement of some members of the expert groups. Overall, the processes do not differ as much as we might expect. The average level of preference attainment tends to be positive or only slightly below zero, indicating that there is still considerable consensus in Swiss policy outcomes. However, there is considerable variation within the cases, while a higher average tends to correspond with smaller standard deviation (correlation: -0.50). Table 2 displays preference attainment for different actor types. 8 The number in brackets indicates the number of different groups as explained above, some organizations participated in several processes and are therefore counted several times. The actor types differ substantially in their perceived success in policy processes. On top of the list figure the center-right parties, the federal actors and business interest groups. The unions and the right parties are 8 The coding of actor types was done if possible according to classification in the literature on Swiss politics (e.g. Linder 2005, Kriesi & Trechsel 2008). 12

13 Table 1: Preference attainment: overview by process Process Mean Std. Dev. Min Max N Constitutional article on education (Bildungsrahmenartikel in der Bundesverfassung) Taxation of savings income (Bilaterale II: Zinsbesteuerungsabkommen) Infrastructure fund (Infrastrukturfondsgesetz) Law on financial perequation (Neugestaltung des Finanzausgleichs) Free movement of persons, extention (Ausweitung der Personenfreizügigkeit) Law on telecommunication (Fernmeldegesetz) Schengen/Dublin treaties (Bilaterale II: Schegen/Dublin) Program of budget relief (Entlastungsprogramm 2003) Pension reform (11. AHV Revision) Law on nuclear energy (Kernenergiegesetz) Migration law (Bundesgesetz über Ausländerinnen und Ausländer) Total slightly above zero (zero being neutral ). The left parties and the SMOs appear to be the losers: for these two types of actors the average level of preference attainment is below zero. The variance not only reflects the heterogeneity of organizations within the actor types but also difference in preference attainment for the same group in different processes. The the left parties, for example, were sometimes quite successful, sometimes not at all. 13

14 Table 2: Preference attainment: overview by type Type Mean Std. Dev. Min Max N (N org) Center-right party (5) Federal (12) Business interest (14) Firm (6) Other (15) Union (6) Right party (4) Left party (4) SMO (11) Total (77) 5.2 Access and reputation We now turn to the description of the independent variables. Table 3 gives an overview of the two participation measures. As in table 2, the N in brackets lists the number of different parties and organizations within each actor type. With regard to participation in the pre-parliamentary phase, federal actors have the highest participation rate, followed by the center-right and the right parties. Contrary to what we would expect, interest groups do not participate more in pre-parliamentary decision-making than parties. SMOs and firms have the lowest participation rate. As for participation in important phases, parties and federal actors are also the most integrated, however, all actor types have a high participation rate and it is especially striking that even SMOs participate on average in more than 50% of the important stages. Overall, the measures to not differ much. 9 The lowest participation rates for all actor types are in the pre-parliamentary phase, which is quite surprising. The important stages appear to be highly accessible for all actor types, more so than pre-parliamentary decision-making. 9 Correlation:

15 Table 3: Participation Participation pre-parliam. phase Participation important phases Type Mean Std. Dev. Mean Std. Dev. (N org) Federal 49% % (12) Center-right party 41% % (5) Right party 39% % (4) Business interest 35% % (14) Left party 35% % (4) Other 32% % (15) Union 29% % (4) SMO 28% % (11) Firm 25% % (6) Total 37% % (77) Table 4: Reputation Type Mean Std. Dev. Min Max N Right party Union Business interest Center-right party Left party Federal SMO Other Total Table 3 gives an overview of the average reputation for the different actor types. The number of groups is much smaller than above for two reasons. First, no group is counted several times because this measure does not vary between the decision-making processes. Second, the data was collected with a separate questionnaire, which only included a limited number of groups (for the details, see section 4). 10 for SMOs and the Other type. There is not much variation between the actor types, except However, the variation within actor types is considerable, which is visible especially when we look at the minimum and maximum values. For example, the maximum value of 0.92 for one of the parties in Right party means that 92% of all respondents considered this party (the Swiss Peoples Party) as important. Among the left parties, the Socialists were considered important in 82% of all judgements. All actor types with the exception of the unions include groups with very low reputation No reputation measure for firms is available. 11 The results for the unions are due to the pre-selection problem described above. The list which was handed out to the respondents contained only the peak-unions. 15

16 5.3 Determinants of preference attainment The aim of the final section of this paper is to assess the joint impact of the variables described so far on preference attainment. The hypotheses postulate that participation as well as the reputation of an organization has an impact on its success in legislative-decision-making. Table 5 shows the results for a simple linear model with indicators for the different group types ( left parties is the reference category). As it appears, neither participation in the preparliamentary phase, nor reputation seem to predict preference attainment very well. The coefficients are slightly positive but with large standard errors. Much more interesting are the results for the different actor types. Compared to left parties, the center right parties seem to be the most successful, together with the federal actors and the business interest groups. Further, the unions and the right parties are probably slightly more successful than the left parties and the SMOs a little less, but the results for these latter actors are not very reliable. Table 5: Preference attainment: Model 1 Coef. est Model 1 s.e (Intercept) partpp reput Center-right party *** Right party Union Business interest *** SMO Federal *** Other * Resid. Std. Error 1.51 R-squared 0.28 N

17 Table 6: Models of preference attainment Model 2 Model 3 Model 4 Coef. est s.e Std. dev. Coef. est s.e Std. dev. Coef. est s.e Std. dev. (Intercept) partpp partimp reput partimp*reput pospp cvp evp fdp gruene sp svp ecosuisse sgb Residual AIC DIC Deviance N

18 To examine the relations in more detail, it might be appropriate to account for the variation between the different decision-making processes, and we thus turn to multi-level models. Table 6 shows the estimated coefficients and standard errors for three multilevel linear models 12 with varying intercepts and varying slopes for the 11 decision-making processes. Standard deviations of the group estimates are included in the third column. Model 2 tests again the impact of reputation and of participation in the pre-parliamentary phase. Instead of actor type indicators, dummies for all parties and interest groups which participated in 8 or more of the 11 cases are included. 13 As for participation, the estimated coefficient is even lower than before. The estimate for reputation, on the other hand, is much higher now, though not statistically significant. The large standard errors for both variables might indicate that the relation is even negative in some processes, which is actually the case. Again, we can not reject the null hypothesis. Turning to the estimates for the parties and interest groups, the pattern pretty much resembles the previous results. Now the reference is a much broader variety of actors, but still the center-right parties (cvp, evp, fdp) appear as the winners, while the left parties and the unions are not successful at all. As for the peak organization of the business interest groups, the estimate is slightly negative, but the standard error much too large to draw any conclusions. Model 3 estimates the impact of participation in important phases and further the interaction between participation and reputation. Surprisingly, the estimated coefficient for the interaction is reasonably large and significant, indicating that participation might only have an impact when the actors reputation is high, or vice-versa, an actor with high reputation might only be successful, if he participates intensely in the decision-making process. be examined in more detail below. This result will First, we turn to Model 4: This model includes again the participation and reputation variables and the interaction term. Moreover, a measure for the actors position at the beginning of the process is added (dummy, 1 for positive, 0 for neutral or negative). The idea behind this is to control for the fact that some actors just might be lucky: their preferences are in line with the majority (or with the powerful actor who determine the outcome) and they get the result they prefer without doing anything. Looking at the results, it is not very surprising that the position at the beginning of the process is a powerful predictor of preference attainment. This 12 The models were fitted with the lmer-function in R. 13 Dummies: cvp: Christian democratic party (government); evp: Protestant party; fdp: Liberal party (government); gruene: Green party; sp: Social democrats (government); svp: Swiss people s party (government); ecosuisse: economiesuisse, peak organization of business interest groups; sgb: Gewerkschaftsbund, peak organization of the unions. 18

19 might indicate that the legislative text does usually not change much between the first draft and the final version: groups that are unhappy in the beginning will still be unhappy at the end of the process. Moreover, it might indicate that the some groups intervene already in the stages that preceded the first draft, such that their preferences have already been integrated in this first version, or they even determine what is on the agenda and what is excluded (Bachrachand & Baratz 1962). It is nevertheless striking that even when we control for preferences at the beginning of the process, the conditional effect of reputation and participation remains strong and significant. That is, even an actor who is already in favor at the beginning of the process, will be more successful if she has a high reputation and participates intensely in the process. To examine this interaction in more detail, we study the differences in the estimated coefficients for the 11 cases (see as well Appendix). Figure 1 plots the estimated regression lines for three levels of reputation: low (dashed line), moderate (gray line) and high (all dummies set to 0). The interaction is clearly visible in most cases. For a very low level of reputation, the effect of participation is sometimes even negative, and it becomes stronger with an increasing level of reputation. It appears that in some cases the interaction is much stronger than in others. These are quite possibly the cases where, for various reasons, the negotiations are difficult and conflictual. It would make sense that in such a case it is much more important to have high reputation combined with high access to the system to prevail in the end. This becomes visible in the picture. The cases were sorted according to the average level of preference attainment, and we see that the first four cases, where average preference attainment had been low, clearly differ from the last three cases, where preference attainment had been highest on average. 19

20 Migration law participation Figure 1: Estimated regression lines for three levels of reputation Law on nuclear energy Pension reform pref.attainment pref.attainment pref.attainment pref.attainment participation participation Program of budget relief participation Telecommunication law participation Schengen/Dublin treaties Free movement of persons pref.attainment pref.attainment pref.attainment pref.attainment participation participation Law on financial perequation participation Infrastructure fund participation Taxation of savings Const. article on education pref.attainment pref.attainment pref.attainment participation participation 20

21 6 Conclusion This analysis is interested in determinants of preference attainment in Swiss policy-making. It distiguishes between institution-specific and actor-specific factors. More specifically, it examines the impact of institutions and power and hypothesizes that both have a considerable impact on an actors s ability to get the outcome he desires. To take into account an important theoretical discussion among scholars of Swiss politics, it also examines the variation between different actor types, such as parties, interest groups and social movement organizations. With respect to the variation of preference attainment between various actor types, we find that center-right parties together with the business interest organizations are the most successful, while left parties and SMOs appear as the clear losers. However, the results for the latter groups are not very stable. As for the postulated effect of participation and reputation, the null hypotheses cannot be rejected on the basis of the present data and analysis. We do not find a direct impact of access to the pre-parliamentary stages as postulated in H1 nor of access to important stages, as postulated in H2. Neither does reputation seem to have a direct influence. However, there appears to be a strong joint influence of participation and reputation: actors with high reputation who are at the same time highly implicated in the process are the most successful. This conditional effect even holds when we control for the original positions in the process. Moreover, it is stable for all eleven cases. In his study on decision-making processes in the 1970s, Kriesi (1980, 687) concluded that even if a multitude of actors take part in the decision-making, still most of them are not able to influence the policy outcome. Examining the results of this present analysis, the conclusions are quite similar. Various actors are deeply integrated in the decision-making process, however, this does not lead to preference attainment in most instances. It is often the case that actors are included and still do not have influence on the outcome. On the other hand, if the results of this study are valid, even actors with high reputation will not always get their preferred outcome. In this regard, the assumptions that the decision-makers might simply anticipate the preferences of some powerful groups, or that informal access can substitute formal participation find no confirmation in this present paper. Finally, it has become evident that the decision-making processes differ considerably. Process-specific characteristics such as level of conflict of positions, or even aspects of the broader context in which the bargaining takes places might strongly impact on the mechanisms of preference attainment. However to test these effects, we would need more data. 21

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