Swiss Public Administration

This first chapter provides the contextual framework indispensable for an understanding of Swiss public administration. It starts with a brief look at the bottom-up genesis of the Swiss nation-state and its subsequent expansion through a transfer of competencies from the cantons to the national level. It also highlights the country’s heterogeneity in terms of economic performance, religion, and language and the efforts needed to keep the country together. In a next step, the chapter presents the Swiss state model which falls in-between the Nordic welfare state model and a liberal minimal state. This gives a more accurate picture of the low ratio of government expenditure to GDP. Federalism, direct democracy, and a system of ‘concordance’ are the three cornerstones of the Swiss political system, and all three are based on the principle of power-sharing, and they prevent competencies in decision-making and finances from becoming too concentrated.

This chapter discusses how the provision of tasks and services is organized in Switzerland. Starting historically only with military expenditures and subsidies for cantonal projects, the federal level subsequently expanded into policies such as infrastructure and transportation projects, as well as guiding the expansion of the welfare state. More recently, federal decision-makers and administrators have engaged in economic and environmental policy-making. Subsidiarity and fiscal equivalence are the guiding principles when it comes to allocating tasks to the three levels of government. Nevertheless, there is a high degree of cooperation between these levels, as well as among the cantons and the communities, or between the state and the private sector. Increasing governmental responsibilities and the importance of the various actors in fulfilling tasks is mirrored in their finances and financing modes. This is all the more significant because each level in Switzerland has its own sources of income and must pay for its own expenditures.

This chapter is devoted to the characteristics of the Swiss administrations at all three levels, the Confederation, the cantons, and the cities or communities. It addresses the composition of the public sector through the legal forms its employees work under. The highest number of public administration employees is found at the cantonal level, followed by employees in entities under public law. The chapter also shows how the administrations at all three levels are organized and addresses uniquely Swiss characteristics, including that hardly any civil servants have permanent employment status, the dependence on non-professional and part-time politicians and experts, and how multilingualism is handled. It ends by comparing the Swiss administrative system to other administrative traditions and concludes that Switzerland has opted for a hybrid solution.

In describing the two central aspects of law and the principle of legality, this chapter underscores how both formal and material laws are part of the Swiss legal system. It also introduces the concepts of legislation and the hierarchy of norms. Swiss law is not limited to written laws but also includes unwritten principles and case law. All these elements stress how pervasive legal aspects are in today’s policies. Law is the basis of state action, but law also limits such action.

In Switzerland, the federal administration has developed expertise in the elaboration of federal laws. Such expertise has been gradually codified, first in specific guides and then in federal laws. After a chronological presentation of the different steps in the pre-parliamentary phase, the chapter then discusses the limits to, and accessibility of, the numerous documents involved. The elaborate preliminary procedures supposedly increase the quality of the law and contribute to the gradual construction of a political consensus. Issues of vertical power are concealed behind these well-established procedures, and they are inversely proportional to the hierarchical position of the public officials in charge. Such power is also unequally distributed between the different offices.

With the expansion of international cooperation, Switzerland, like other countries, has developed a set of specific instruments to integrate international law into domestic law. Nevertheless, direct democracy lends a distinctive aspect to the Swiss legal system. The object of the chapter is to show how the Swiss federal administration plays a role in maintaining a balance—as far as possible—between two poles: direct democracy and respect for international law. The two instruments of direct democracy, the referendum and the popular initiative, are analysed in the light of their influence on the signature, ratification and implementation of international treaties. The distribution of roles and competencies put in place within the administration demonstrates a sophisticated institutional engineering in terms of treaty ratification.

Classically, instruments of state action are laws, decisions, and contracts. Such acts are characterized by their legally binding nature. This chapter shows how administrative activity is not exhausted by such legal acts and uses other instruments, commonly defined as ‘soft law’, to increase the efficiency of public action. Such instruments complement traditional administrative activity and are today a key component of public policy. Focusing on the Swiss example, this chapter looks into the difficulties state action through soft law poses, by describing the forms it can take, the legal effects it (potentially) generates, its effectiveness, and the instruments to guarantee its legitimacy.

This chapter deals with the Swiss judicial system. It first describes the organization of this system, which is strongly marked by the federal character of Switzerland (so there is pronounced judicial federalism). The philosophy of the system at the federal level is presented, and judicial organization of the cantons is briefly described. The chapter then describes the Swiss system of judicial review (control of the constitutionality of the laws and other state acts), a system which is relatively complete and extended. Yet at the same time, it has a notable exception in international comparison: Switzerland lacks judicial review of federal laws and international law.

In 2017, the Swiss Confederation introduced a new management model (known as NMG) to better manage the federal administration and facilitate steering at all levels. It is worth understanding this model better, how it is applied in practice, and to consider whether it can inspire new ways of managing the public sector. Will the NMG become the “Swiss way of management” in the public sector? To answer this question, we first look at the GMEB model, a precursor to the NMG. We then describe the peculiarities of the NMG, and in what manner it is “new” compared with other Swiss and foreign approaches; here we introduce the “public performance diamond”. Finally, we examine the case of Swiss Federal Office of Topography (swisstopo), an office which was both a pioneer in adopting the GMEB model and one of the first to use the new NMG mode.

This chapter describes the transition of the Swiss public sector in its efforts to establish a digital ecosystem. The goals are to make public services centered on the needs of citizens and businesses more efficient, to reduce the costs of administration and improve its operations, and—arguably—to create a ‘smart government’ using emerging technologies which can benefit from the digitalization of services.

While the last decades have seen a spectacular expansion in public-private partnerships (PPPs) in many high-income European countries, only two PPPs have been realized in Switzerland so far. In this chapter, we define what PPPs are and the optimal conditions under which they should be chosen. Our normative approach highlights that PPPs are not a panacea, and that the choice to use a PPP should be driven by the characteristics of the public service considered, according to transaction cost theory. We then consider the cultural and institutional differences that can explain the variations in the number of PPPs which are actually implemented accross countries with similar level of development. We point out that while there are probably too few PPPs in Switzerland, particularly due to the lack of a specific legal and institutional framework, there are clearly too many of them in some other countries.

Human resources management (HRM) is undoubtedly the area in the public sector which has evolved the most in the last 25 years, especially in Switzerland. This chapter summarizes the most important developments affecting HRM statutes, policies, and processes, and argues that HRM in Swiss public organizations is increasingly oriented to strategically managing human capital. Political and cultural factors are key enablers of this maturation process, one which has led to introducing human resource (HR) strategies, a professionalization of HR managers, and state-of-the-art HR practices and tools. The originality of a hybrid legal framework which uses a public law contract as the legal form of employment is typical for what we’ve called the “post-civil service” environment Switzerland now finds itself in.

Communication has become increasingly important within administrations. Compared to private companies, the communication of public organisations is much more varied: the range of functions is very wide (service delivery, maintenance of social cohesion, dialogue between institutions and citizens, etc.) and the types of communications are more extensive, ranging from communication about citizen’s rights and obligations, communication as instrument of public policy to communication about projects. In addition, public communication will become even more complex with increasing demands for information, increased participation of citizens in the debate and a growing number of media to consider.

This chapter discusses how financial management at the various Swiss government levels is governed by legislation and organized in practice. It presents the legal framework, the main institutional settings and the actors involved. Within the Swiss federalist system, the cantons exercise considerable autonomy in financial management; each canton has designed its own way to manage its public finances. The ‘standard’ financial management both at the federal and at the cantonal level is summarized here. Checks and balances in the system have led—particularly in the last two decades—to sound public budgets with relatively low debt levels. Two specifically Swiss institutions meant to ensure the government’s fiscal sustainability are presented: the fiscal rules and the financial referendum.

The goal of this chapter is to give the reader the keys to understanding the financial statements and budget plans as they are prepared and presented by Swiss governments at the three different levels. In Switzerland, as elsewhere, financial statements are a major element of governmental information systems, and must be organized so as to respond to the various expectations interested parties have of the government. These expectations have evolved over time as the country’s internal institutions have transformed, as well as due to technical, accounting, and computing changes. Swiss governments have achieved a high standard of quality in their financial statements with some of them fulfilling all the requirements formulated in the International Public Sector Accounting Standards (IPSASs). This is remarkable, considering the great autonomy the cantons have in this area, and remarkable in the absence of legal strictures obligating cantonal governments to use the proposed harmonized accounting model.

There are few domains as suited as taxation at expressing the particularities of the Swiss system. Various elements combine here: the smallness of the country and of its cantons (and thus their exposure to external political and economic context), the federal system, the country’s decentralization, and direct democracy. The tax system, seen as a whole, is not a rational, systematic, or even theoretical construction, and Swiss fiscality offers a diversity that likely does not exist anywhere else. Depending on the canton, revenue, wealth, profit, capital, and even inheritances are taxed differently. Municipalities can also choose the taxes they wish to levy and the tax rate. Two key elements explain why significant differences in the cantonal and municipal tax burdens exist: tax competition and the balance between direct and indirect taxes. Despite these differences, a large majority of the Swiss population continues to favor cantonal and municipal tax autonomy.

It is extremely rare for Swiss institutions to undergo a revolution. And yet for the last ten years, the financial transfer and equalization system between the federal and cantonal levels have been reformed so much that it can rightly be considered a revolution. Most cantons followed suit and transformed their own systems with their municipalities based on the federal model. This chapter briefly surveys how the systems are organized, and describes their benefits and shortcomings. Switzerland has established rules that guarantee a certain automatism and a regularity to equalization flows. By the same token, no discretionary decisions to grant subsidies to decentralized municipalities are now possible—and there is no way for the wealthiest jurisdictions to ignore those political entities worse off than them. These rules ensure that tax competition between both cantons and municipalities can continue to exist, but within acceptable and accepted limits.

The Swiss social security system seems rather successful. However, the fragmented nature of the system and the inability of the political system to deal with the challenges that lie ahead constitute serious problems. The social security system is fragmented along federalist lines as well as between institutions that cater to different groups. This makes coordination difficult and generates incentives for institutions to offload clients (and costs) onto other institutions. As in other European countries, the pension system needs to be adapted to an increasingly large population of the elderly. Doing so is politically difficult, and to date, opponents have managed to defeat governmental reform proposals.

This chapter summarizes the institutional foundations, actor conflicts, and main policy challenges for health policymaking in Switzerland. Federalism, liberalism, subsidiarity, and direct democracy have shaped long-term trends and current politics in Swiss health policymaking. Cantons and municipalities, as well as private actors that include health insurance funds and professional organizations, play an important role in financing and providing health care services and enjoy considerable influence in the policy process. Responsibilities are fragmented, all-encompassing national regulations are limited, and individual co-payments for patients are high. Therefore, policymakers face difficulties in coordinating national health policies, in reducing costs, and in putting comprehensive preventative health policies in place.

This chapter shows how public administrations, in order to maintain influence over the conduct of public policies, assume new roles, at least when compared to the tasks and sovereign competencies under an ideal-typical Weberian bureaucracy. Empirical evidence from Switzerland indicates that an administrative entity can cast itself in turn as a policy broker and mediator in political conflicts (during policy formulation) but also as a co-producer of administrative services and network facilitator (during policy implementation). The results of a formal social network analysis (SNA) suggest that these new roles do not entail a loss of public administration influence. On the contrary, it is by adapting and also abandoning a state-centric vision and hierarchical position, as well as finding a place within a policy network as a broker, facilitator, or co-producer, that public administrations are able to maintain their ability to significantly influence the content of public policies.

In the most recent international comparisons, Switzerland ranks as one of the top three countries with the most institutionalized evaluation systems. This is a recent development, one which has been especially rapid in recent decades. This chapter retraces this evolution and the factors contributing to it. They include, in particular, many actors at the interface between different universes, the incorporation of an obligation to evaluate not only in the Swiss Constitution but also in specific laws, and the use of evaluation results both in political contexts and in public administration. To continue the momentum, Switzerland’s challenge today is to continue to disseminate a culture of evaluation; this will make it possible to promote enlightened democratic debate.