Disillusioned Brits and Overwhelmed Swiss: Comparing Citizens’ Talk about Politics and Participatory Decision-Making in a Pure Representative Democracy and Semi-Direct Democracy

For several decades political scientists have warned that citizens in established democracies are increasingly disengaged from traditional politics. As a solution to this, participatory democrats have recommended providing ordinary citizens with more opportunities to be involved in political decisions. However, dissatisfaction with politics is often studied using generalized survey items, providing limited insight into the nature and scope of political discontent or how its manifestations differ across established democracies with different institutional designs. Through a series of focus group discussions conducted in 2015, we compare citizens’ talk about politics and participation in political decisions in Switzerland and Britain. Whereas Switzerland is a typical consensus democracy with a tradition of referendums and initiatives, Britain is a strong majoritarian democracy providing fewer opportunities for citizens to influence politics. The British focus group discussions were characterized by strong elements of anti-politics: politicians are out-of-touch, political parties are all the same, governments don’t keep their promises, and voting is pointless. However participants expressed reluctance about encouraging citizens to take important political decisions and seemed to prefer reforms aimed at improving representative politics instead. In Switzerland citizens’ talk was mostly about referendums and initiatives, while references to specific politicians, parliamentary elections, or political parties (except the SVP) were uncommon. Most participants agreed that direct democracy was a great privilege, however they also raised concerns about its functioning. Namely, that citizens are overwhelmed by the “flood of initiatives” and the complicated voting materials and that political elites are not responsive enough to citizens’ demands.