infonet-economy

Swiss–EU relations are based on a set of negotiated sector-specific agreements and lack central coordinating institutions or enforcement mechanisms. At first sight, this arrangement promises a much greater degree of autonomy and self-determination towards the EU than the comprehensive and legally constraining architecture of the EEA. This official depiction has been questioned in…

Dominant narratives and theories developed at the turn of the 21st century in order to account for civil wars in Africa converged around the idea that this upsurge in violence was linked to state failure or decay. Violent conflict thus came to be seen as the expression of the weakness, disintegration and collapse of political institutions in the post-colonial world, and guerrilla…

One of the most important factors which prevent developing countries from reaching a sustainable development is their vulnerability to international price shocks and to natural shocks. Opening trade with developed countries, which are far geographically and different in terms of production patterns could increase developing countries' vulnerability. On the one hand, this leads…

James Rule is puzzled by the ‘idiosyncratic’ approach that I take to the philosophical study of privacy. As evidence for this idiosyncracy, he cites my relative indifference to the distinction between consequentialist and deontological perspectives on privacy although these differences are proof of ‘intricate, yet enormously consequential intellectual tensions’. My choice of…

This article operationalizes the mediatization of politics by comparing the expressed preferences toward the mass media between different groups of members of parliament (MPs) in three conflicted legislative decision-making processes in Switzerland. Different from elections, MPs face a more pronounced tension between audience-oriented and policy-oriented activities in legislative…

Since the 2000s, local communities responsible for the management of common-pool resources, such as water or forest, have started to organize themselves regionally in order to promote their mode of community-based governance. Such a change in the scale of governance and in the agency of local communities reflects the on-going globalization of common-pool resources. Furthermore, it…

This article deals with the evolution of class voting in Switzerland from 1971 to 2011. It shows that class cleavage (working class versus owners/employers) has weakened in Switzerland. The existence of a large right-wing party with strong support among the working class contributes to blurring the traditional class divisions in voting. However, the analysis indicates that class…

This contribution proposes a decentred conceptualization of Euro- pean Union (EU) international influence based on the external ramifications of its internal policies. It views the EU’s international role less as that of an emerging unitary actor than as conglomerate of loosely coupled sectoral regimes expanding their prescriptive scope towards third countries in differentiated ways…

This paper looks at the determinants of the political participation of Muslims. We assess the impact of associational involvement on their overall political participation and their involvement in protest activities. We do so using original survey data consisting of a random sample of Muslim residents in Switzerland. Our analysis provides support to the argument that associational…