"Switzerland is as deeply polarized as the USA" | Hacker News Reader

"Switzerland is as deeply polarized as the USA"

news.uzh.ch

15 pointssharpshadow16 comments

Ah, let me know about that when the president of the Swiss Confederation calls for the vice-president to be hung during an antigovernment riot.

Switzerland has institutions that deal with polarization, as it has had centuries of experience (most notably along the french/german border, also known as the rosti trench :) ). For example seats in the executive branch are shared between parties. It's kind of insane, but somehow it works. And Switzerland isn't the only country with institutionally handled polarization.

Is that the border between French and German speaking parts of Switzerland?

It is not a border, ofc. It is just a "mental concept"; and not a hard cut. There are villages/cities where both languages are spoken/understood. So one language spoken gradually changes into the other one.

Yeah sorry - I didn't mean "border" in the sense of a legal boundary between countries or regions.

But polarization on some kind of issues still does happen. From the article:

Which issues are polarizing society today?

Häusermann: In the 21st century, it’s socio-political issues like minority rights, equality and migration in particular that are having a polarizing effect. And internationalization – should a country open itself up or cut itself off. By contrast, in the 20th century the polarizing issues were mainly distributional questions in relation to taxes and social benefits, for example.

> In the 21st century, it’s socio-political issues like minority rights, equality and migration in particular that are having a polarizing effect. And internationalization – should a country open itself up or cut itself off. By contrast, in the 20th century the polarizing issues were mainly distributional questions in relation to taxes and social benefits, for example.

The headline is perplexing, and I don't understand it much better in context:

"In many other countries, there are lots of smaller parties at either end of the political spectrum. That’s why Switzerland is as heavily polarized as other highly polarized countries like the USA."

I think the idea is that Switzerland's multiple parties are drifting further apart -- the right-wing ones are moving further right, and the left-wing ones are moving further left.

I gather that's what sociologists mean by "polarized": the opinions are increasingly different. But when I think of polarization in the US, that also includes the intensity of feeling.

The US has reached the point where both sides are accusing each other of criminality. One Presidential candidate has been convicted of a crime and is on trial for several more. He claims that this is the result of persecution. Either way, at least one side (possibly both) is committing malfeasance.

Both parties accuse the other of manipulating the electoral system, including fraudulent votes. And individuals show a deep level of antipathy for each other, including threats of violence.

So I think I perhaps understand the statement as true, viewed the way they view it, but it's not the way I think of that expression.

> So I think I perhaps understand the statement as true, viewed the way they view it, but it's not the way I think of that expression.

I'm from Switzerland and my education includes law and some political science. I think the article is rather motivated by "publish or perish" combined with the endeavor to persuade as many people as possible to read the article, and should not be taken too seriously.

> "Switzerland is as deeply polarized as the USA"

Such a claim is obviously wrong, since in Switzerland we have a great many parties with all sorts of political positions, not just two. To divide the political spectrum into only "left" and "right" is an oversimplification. Switzerland still has a healthy distribution of the population across the political spectrum, and it regularly happens that so-called "right-wing" parties advocate left-wing issues and vice versa (as can be seen again in the last vote). As in the USA, however, academic dellusion is also spreading in this country; I recently found this video which has a good explanation for this phenomenon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Peima-Uw7w (Why Smart People Believe Stupid Things).

> To divide the political spectrum into only "left" and "right"

I don't think it's as easy as "left"/right" in the US. The Democratic Party for example hardly champions many of the ideas someone like FDR or the social democratic left did/does.

Republicans are split between a typical conservative, more of a "libertarian" and then a Paleoconservative wings etc. But yes, party-wise it's only two that are viable.

Left/Right is a totally outdated and oversimplified categorization and I just do not get how it is still being used even by moderately intelligent people. It just became obvious in Germany, where the far right party (AfD) lost many votes to a newly formed party, that fractioned from the far left party (Die Linke). The voters did not even have to change their political view to make the switch from "far left" to "far right".

There have been attempts like the Political Compass[1] and the Nolan Chart[2]. Both are better than the right-left categories, but still none have been widely adopted. It is as if Mathematics would still exclusively use integer numbers. Political science get their stuff together and come up with something better, if they one day want to be seen as a "science".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Political_Compass

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nolan_Chart

Look at the UK - where Leaver/Remainer (or Rejoiners these days) has become a major political categorisation that doesn't really map onto the standard left/right political spectrum (e.g. both those on the far right and far left tended to be Leavers).

>The voters did not even have to change their political view to make the switch from "far left" to "far right".

Die Linke has almost never managed to practice what it preaches when it comes to ostensibly leftist values; besides, this just sounds like the nth iteration of successful right opportunism.

> this just sounds like the nth iteration of successful right opportunism.

This is exactly what I am talking about. Can you elaborate what "right" means in this case?

Pffff... what do these people from..ummmm.. University of Zurich's Department of Political Science know about Swiss politcs eh

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