The domestic politics of the Swiss‐EU negotiations on the Institutional Framework Agreement (and beyond)

This article examines the domestic political dynamics surrounding the negotiations between Switzerland and the European Union (EU) on the Institutional Framework Agreement. It identifies the main domestic difficulties that prevented an agreement from being reached. The empirical reconstruction of the negotiations suggests that domestic consensus became very difficult because the issues under negotiation were two-dimensional, activating both the anti-EU and the left–right dimensions. Moreover, the data suggest two main factors that prevented this difficulty from being resolved. First, political parties across the political spectrum were internally divided on the issues under negotiation. Second, the worsening corporatist dynamic between the Confederation and the social partners, as well as between the social partners themselves, made it very difficult to activate the concessions to the trade unions that had been used in previous EU negotiations to secure their agreement.