Patterns of Agenda Setting: A Configurational Application in Swiss Politics

Inspired by the agenda setting literature, this paper investigates the widely neglected decision-making process that precedes the drafting process of a law. Thus, the outcome of interest is what we call the legislative agenda, namely that a legislative mandate to draft a law is present. While it is known that in Western European countries various political actors play together before a drafting process gets started, it remains unclear how this interplay looks like. This paper draws on Switzerland as a laboratory and uses fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA; N=15) to investigate decision-making processes at the federal level. We find that (i) it takes multiple actors to put an issue on the legislative agenda, (ii) internal actors (government and parliament) not only struggle against external actors (e.g., interest groups), they also struggle against each other, (iii) when it comes to the struggle between internal actors, it is a majority of a parliamentary committee that thwarts the plans of the government. We conclude that the government is far from being a gatekeeper for legislative projects and is challenged from various sides.