Study title

Swiss national parliamentary elections are frequently considered "low salience" elections. On the one hand, the emphasis on direct democratic elements in the Swiss constitution provides citizens with extensive opportunities to exert institutionalized political influence beyond the parliamentary channel. On the other hand, shifts in political parties' electoral fortunes had not had any consequences for government composition between 1959 and 2003, due to an informal agreement called the "Zauberformel" (magic formula). The interest in national elections has thus been rather limited for a long time – not only on the part of the Swiss electorate (turnout between 1971 and 2019 has mostly been under 50%), but also on the part of academic electoral research: No single election survey had been conducted until the early 1970s. After two initial surveys in the wake of the 1971 (Sidjanski et al. 1975) and 1975 federal elections (Barnes and Kaase 1979), the 1979 election witnessed the launching of the first VOX survey realized by the Swiss Society for Applied Social Research (GfS) and the University of Bern (Hertig 1980). Thereafter, VOX surveys have accompanied the subsequent federal elections of 1983, 1987 and 1991, and a booklet has been published on each of them (Longchamp 1984, 1988; Longchamp and Hardmeier 1992). Although the VOX surveys could have laid the foundation of a Swiss national election study, these data collection efforts did not trigger many follow-up secondary analyses. Scholars interested in voting behaviour still focused much more on referendums and initiatives than on parliamentary elections – as did the VOX surveys. It was probably the growing polarization of Swiss politics and the rise of the populist right in the early 1990s that generated a new surge of interest in federal elections. The 1995 election constituted, in Peter Farago's (1995) words, a “new start” in this respect, with the formation of the Swiss Election Study (Selects) project,...