I am curious why Switzerland isn’t more popular among people who want to change the political system. It has direct democracy, decades of success, few problems...
The cynical explanation is that promoting a system someone else invented and tested is not so good for signalling.
I am curious why Switzerland isn’t more popular among people who want to change the political system. It has direct democracy, decades of success, few problems...
The correct question is whether Switzerland’s success is caused by its political system. If not, emulating it won’t help.
We can at least be sure that Switzerland’s success hasn’t been prevented by its political system. This isn’t a proof that the system should be copied, but it’s at least a hint that it should be studied.
Switzerland is pretty small, and it’s not obvious to me that its political system would scale well to larger countries. But then again, it’s not obvious to me that it wouldn’t, either.
My very superficial knowledge says that Switzerland consists of relatively independent regions, which can have different tax rates, and maybe even different laws. These differences allow people to do some lower-scale experiments, and probably allow an individual to feel like a more important part of the whole (one in a few thousands feels better than one in a few millions). I would guess this division to regions is very important.
So a question is, if we wanted to “Switzerland-ize” a larger country, should we aim for the same size (population) or the same number of regions? Greater region size may reduce the effect of an individual feeling important, but greater number of regions could make the interactions among them more complicated. Or maybe the solution would be to have regions and sub-regions, but then it is not obvious (i.e. cannot be copied straightforwardly) what should be the power relationship between the regions and their sub-regions.
It would be safer to try this experiment first in a country of a similar size. Just in case some Illuminati are reading this discussion, I volunteer Slovakia for this experiment, although my countrymen might disagree. Please feel free to ignore them. :D
My very superficial knowledge says that Switzerland consists of relatively independent regions, which can have different tax rates, and maybe even different laws.
Reminds me of some large countries… in North America, I think? :-)
Then again, population-wise it’s bigger than reactionary poster children such as Singapore or Monaco and comparable to progressivist poster children such as Sweden or Denmark.
I am curious why Switzerland isn’t more popular among people who want to change the political system. It has direct democracy, decades of success, few problems...
The cynical explanation is that promoting a system someone else invented and tested is not so good for signalling.
The correct question is whether Switzerland’s success is caused by its political system. If not, emulating it won’t help.
We can at least be sure that Switzerland’s success hasn’t been prevented by its political system. This isn’t a proof that the system should be copied, but it’s at least a hint that it should be studied.
Switzerland is pretty small, and it’s not obvious to me that its political system would scale well to larger countries. But then again, it’s not obvious to me that it wouldn’t, either.
My very superficial knowledge says that Switzerland consists of relatively independent regions, which can have different tax rates, and maybe even different laws. These differences allow people to do some lower-scale experiments, and probably allow an individual to feel like a more important part of the whole (one in a few thousands feels better than one in a few millions). I would guess this division to regions is very important.
So a question is, if we wanted to “Switzerland-ize” a larger country, should we aim for the same size (population) or the same number of regions? Greater region size may reduce the effect of an individual feeling important, but greater number of regions could make the interactions among them more complicated. Or maybe the solution would be to have regions and sub-regions, but then it is not obvious (i.e. cannot be copied straightforwardly) what should be the power relationship between the regions and their sub-regions.
It would be safer to try this experiment first in a country of a similar size. Just in case some Illuminati are reading this discussion, I volunteer Slovakia for this experiment, although my countrymen might disagree. Please feel free to ignore them. :D
Reminds me of some large countries… in North America, I think? :-)
For various levels of superficiality, yeah.
Then again, population-wise it’s bigger than reactionary poster children such as Singapore or Monaco and comparable to progressivist poster children such as Sweden or Denmark.