After the 2015 Swiss parliamentary elections, media outlets all over Europe explained the latest ... more After the 2015 Swiss parliamentary elections, media outlets all over Europe explained the latest shift to the right with a persisting anti-European bias among Swiss voters. This shift occurred even though Europe was not a salient topic during the election campaign. In this dissertation I demonstrate that on the topic of the European Union and its policies, Switzerland is a divided country. A comparative analysis of the 1995 and 2011 Swiss elections reveals that socio-psychological variables, such as attitudes towards the EU, have consistently been crucial factors in establishing party choice. The existence of classic divisions on the basis of class, religion and place of residence, coupled with newer value-driven cleavages contends that there is an overarching political conflict between cosmopolitan winners of globalization on one hand and isolationist and protectionist losers of globalization on the other
After the 2015 Swiss parliamentary elections, media outlets all over Europe explained the latest ... more After the 2015 Swiss parliamentary elections, media outlets all over Europe explained the latest shift to the right with a persisting anti-European bias among Swiss voters. This shift occurred even though Europe was not a salient topic during the election campaign. In this dissertation I demonstrate that on the topic of the European Union and its policies, Switzerland is a divided country. A comparative analysis of the 1995 and 2011 Swiss elections reveals that socio-psychological variables, such as attitudes towards the EU, have consistently been crucial factors in establishing party choice. The existence of classic divisions on the basis of class, religion and place of residence, coupled with newer value-driven cleavages contends that there is an overarching political conflict between cosmopolitan winners of globalization on one hand and isolationist and protectionist losers of globalization on the other
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