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Muting Science: Input Overload Versus Scientific Advice in Swiss Policy Making During the Covid‐19 Pandemic
Author(s) -
Armingeon Klaus,
Sager Fritz
Publication year - 2022
Publication title -
the political quarterly
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.373
H-Index - 37
eISSN - 1467-923X
pISSN - 0032-3179
DOI - 10.1111/1467-923x.13151
Subject(s) - parliament , government (linguistics) , pandemic , covid-19 , political science , politics , power (physics) , democracy , federalist , advice (programming) , public administration , sociology , law , computer science , medicine , philosophy , linguistics , physics , disease , pathology , quantum mechanics , infectious disease (medical specialty) , programming language
This article explores why the Swiss Federal Council and the Swiss Federal Parliament were reluctant to follow the majority views of the scientific epidemiological community at the beginning of the second wave of the Covid‐19 pandemic. We propose an institutionalist take on this question and argue that one major explanation could be the input overload that is characteristic of the Swiss federal political system. We define input overload as the simultaneous inputs of corporatist, pluralist, federalist and direct democratic subsystems. Adding another major input—this time from the scientific subsystem—may have threatened to further erode the government's and parliament's discretionary power to cope with the pandemic. We assume that the federal government reduced its input overload by fending off scientific advice.