Who Is Influential and Why? The Determinants of Reputational Power

Abstract

Power is one of the most fundamental concepts in political science, and it is a crucial aspect of decision-making structures. The distribution of power between political actors and coalitions of actors informs us about who is actually able to influence decision-making processes. It is thus no surprise that power is a centerpiece of our assessment of political decision-making in Switzerland. In line with the main argument of this book, Chapter 3 has uncovered important changes in decision-making structures, which resulted in a rebalancing of power between governing parties, interest groups and state executive actors. Conjecturing about the reasons that may account for these changes, we pointed to factors of an organizational and institutional nature. For example, we put forward the decline of pre-parliamentary procedures oriented towards corporatist intermediation as a possible explanation for the weakening of interest groups. More generally, in several chapters it has been suggested that there is a relationship between the institutional design of a decision-making process, the related importance of decision-making phases and an actor’s participation in these phases on the one hand, and the power of actors (and coalitions of actors) on the other. In addition, the analyses carried out in Chapters 2 to 5 draw our attention to the differences in power structure across decision-making processes or types of processes.