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Europeanization of Swiss Law‐Making: Empirics and Rhetoric are Drifting Apart
Author(s) -
Jenni Sabine
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
swiss political science review
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.632
H-Index - 30
eISSN - 1662-6370
pISSN - 1424-7755
DOI - 10.1111/spsr.12098
Subject(s) - rhetoric , political science , law , philosophy , linguistics
In recent years, the sectoral agreements with the EU have increasingly influenced Swiss domestic legislation, while the policy of “autonomous adaptation” less closely followed EU rules. This increasing tension between euro-sceptic domestic law-making and the dynamics of the sectoral integration is one of the main findings of the data set on Europeanization of Swiss legislation presented in this contribution. The data set was established based on the theory of differentiated integration and describes the share of Swiss federal law reforms in the period 1990 – 2010. Four qualitative categories measure the degree of congruence with EU rules and their relation to sectoral agreements with the EU. One third of all legal reforms were assigned to one of the categories of material congruence with EU law. About half of these Europeanization cases can be explained with sectoral agreement negotiations and implementations. In the following, this article explains the methodological approach of the data collection in more detail, presents the results over time and over policy fields, and discusses the relation of Europeanization and differentiated integration.