Private Militia Parliament? The Linkage of Civil Society and Interest Groups with Candidates During the Swiss 2015 Federal Elections: Esquisse and Analytical Perspectives

Whereas in many western European democracies the question of MP revenues is becoming ever more salient in public debate and the political discourse; in Switzerland there is a longstanding tradition of the so-called “militia Parliament” – where MPs only receive nominal compensations for their work all while having to resort to alternative sources of funding for their livelihoods and campaigns. As is known, in Switzerland politicians report multiple ties with interest groups, without serious transparency rules that might check their role in the political process. Therefore, understanding more about these linkages and their effects on the political process has become a crucial political and scientific issue. This article fills a gap and provides a new perspective for the study of political elites and their interaction with civil society organizations during elections by providing a systematic esquisse of the different factors - such as class, profession, gender and political experience - that partake in the existence of these mutual relations between candidates and interest groups. By analyzing data relating to 994 candidates of all seven major parties running during the 2015 federal elections and focusing on all self-reported ties between individual candidates and various interest groups, this new and unique data set allows us to explore the nature of the ties and the varying importance of specific interest groups for candidates from different parties and candidate profiles. Thank to the juxtaposition of interest group types with individual profiles of candidates and the parties they are members of, it provides a deeper perspective of the encroachment of interest groups along different socio-demographic lines. On the data two different perspectives of understanding (pluralist and Marxist) will be tested in order to understand the logic of distribution of ties. Furthermore, political role variations among candidates will be included in the analysis in order to control for candidate quality, or the capability of attraction for support that a candidates has because of their electoral profile. As shown by previous research, higher quality candidates attract in general more support from interest groups than candidates who do not have the same electoral expectations. The analysis shows the existence of an important number of links between interest groups and political parties, with substantial variation between parties and candidate profiles. The main findings are 1) the important encroachment of private interest and civil society organizations in a “militia Parliament” that take the place of public funds and 2) the class nature of the social conflict that clearly represented in the sample; subdivided in its interior by the sectoral distribution of interests in the same group type