This thesis analyzes the public discourse on foreigners and Muslims in Switzerland between 2000 and 2009. In Switzerland, as elsewhere in Europe, the debate on immigration, cultural identity and citizenship seems to focus more and more on the Muslim minority. While the Muslim population belonged to the generic group of foreigners in the public debate until recently, it seems that Muslims have become the main problem for integration in Switzerland. In the past decade, two direct democratic campaigns targeted Muslims, raising the question about the compatibility of Swiss and Muslim cultures. What makes Muslims a special group? How does the public discourse on Muslims differ from the portrayal of foreigners in general? Are Muslims perceived as the main threat to Swiss culture and gender equality? To answer these questions empirically, a quantitative content analysis of four major Swiss newspapers was conducted covering three direct democratic campaigns in the last decade. The aim of the analysis was to inductively grasp the discourse of institutional actors on Muslims and on foreigners in general and to discover the main similarities and differences between how these two categories are depicted. While the demographic composition of the Muslim minority has not changed much in the last decade, the way Muslims are perceived in public discourse did. While certain ethnic groups were still categorized as foreigners in 2000, they are more often assigned to the Muslim minority in 2009. The latter, even though of heterogeneous composition, is seen as a more and more homogeneous group causing problems in other fields than foreigners do. This change in discourse should lead to question the current academic and political debate on integration in Switzerland.
Ce mémoire traite de l’impact des clivages sur le choix partisan en Suisse lors des élections fédérales de 1995 à 2003, en particulier du clivage entre les gagnants et les perdants de la mondialisation et du clivage de classe traditionnel. L'analyse porte à la fois sur l'évolution de cet impact dans le temps (entre 1995 et 2003) et par type de système de partis cantonaux (cantons alémaniques mixtes, cantons romands mixtes et cantons catholiques). Il montre que le clivage entre gagnants et perdants de la globalisation devient toujours plus important pour le choix partisan, et spécialement avec sa dimension normative "ouverture-traditions", en Suisse mais aussi dans les trois types de systèmes de partis cantonaux.
Wenn man von der Sozialdemokratie als Arbeiterpartei spricht, so sind damit zwei, eng zusammenhängende, aber doch unterschiedliche Aspekte gemeint: Erstens, dass die SP die politische Interessenvertreterin der Lohnarbeiterinnen und Lohnarbeiter ist. Zweitens, dass die Mitglieder, sowie die Wählerinnen und Wähler der SP überwiegend Arbeiterinnen und Arbeiter sind und dass Arbeiterinnen und Arbeiter überwiegend SP wählen.
Partant du débat entre représentation descriptive et substantielle d'une part, et de l'analyse féministe de la citoyenneté d'autre part, cette contribution s'intéresse à l'impact des parlementaires sur le développement de la citoyenneté sociale des femmes. Dans ce cadre, le Parlement constitue pour les femmes une arène de choix pour pratiquer leur propre citoyenneté à un niveau élevé. En même temps, le mandat politique représente une structure d'opportunité exceptionnelle pour renouveler les normes et les rapports sociaux de genre. En conséquence, nous tenterons, à travers une analyse des votes nominatifs de la Chambre basse suisse, de tester l'impact du sexe des parlementaires sur les projets de loi qui régulent les rapports de genre.
To what extent does the inclusion of marginalized groups in policymaking institutions influence policy outcomes? This article examines whether and under which conditions female legislators are more likely to represent women’s interests compared to male legislators. Building on the literature on women’s substantive representation, it is argued that the advocacy of women’s interests by female representatives depends on a number of factors, namely party affiliation, contact with women’s organizations, electoral district, and seniority. This argument is evaluated using vote level fixed-effect models based on a unique dataset from a direct-democratic context which combines representatives voting behaviour, women’s voting preferences, and recommendations from feminist groups. The findings show that female legislators defend feminist interests more than their male colleagues but that they only marginally respond to women’s electoral preferences. Moreover, gender has its most visible effect within the populist party.
The Rhone River has long been regarded upon its productive capacities. Shared between two Nation-States, Switzerland and France, the River has been a major development factor for the two countries and the regions situated along its banks. The Swiss part of the Rhone is characterised by the great diversity of its uses. It flows from the Rhone glacier through the agriculture plains of Valais, into the Lake Geneva and then through the city of Geneva. The River has always produced numerous goods and services. It is mainly used for agriculture in its upper part and for hydropower production in Geneva where management of the Rhone is delegated to a semi-public company, the SIG (Services Industriels de Genève). The River has long been canalised and its natural flow massively modified. On the French side, since the 1933, the CNR (Compagnie Nationale du Rhone) is in charge of the river management from the Swiss border to the Mediterranean Sea. The company has three missions: hydropower production, navigation and irrigation. Later on, in a post-war context, the French central State canalised the River considering the Rhone first of all as an industrial tool of Nation’s reconstruction (Pritchard, 2011). This phase greatly modified the state of the River with the construction of 19 infrastructures of hydropower production. The emergence of new water management perspectives (IWRM for example), the implementation of the water framework directive and the increase of environmental legislations and concerns modified the very nature of the Rhone. If, on both sides of the border, the management of the river has been partly delegated to hydropower companies, public stakeholders tend to look for new ways of managing the river basin. Thoughts emerge to reconsider the scale of governance of the river and its actors’ configuration. This communication concerns the current debates and shift in the management of the Rhone river. It aims to show the issues related to a River when its flow is essentially governed through Hydropower companies. It shows what are the constraints of shifting from a sectorial and industrial management of the river to a more integrated water governance perspective. It analyses how the integration of a basin management could be achieved in a River mainly governed by private arrangements, between hydropower companies, benefiting from strong use rights. Our communication has several objectives. Firstly, we analyse the existing management arrangements of the Rhone River. We look at the actors’ configuration and try to understand the rivalries emerging among the different uses of the Rhone, focusing on the central function of hydropower companies and their multiple scales of intervention. Secondly, we concentrate ourselves on the actual new phase of River management and look at how public actors attempt to tackle the central issue of increasing coordination at the basin scale. Finally, we discuss different questions such as which scale to adopt to achieve an IWRM in a transborder context? To what extent could it be done in an intersectoral perspective (Nahrath et al. 2009) while hydropower producers have such a central function in the regulation of the River? Should it be based on the river basin scale (Hering & Ingold, 2012) or on more flexible and multi-scalar arrangements? What kind of institutional and governance structures could match with those scale rearrangements?
