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The voting campaign is heated and emotional, and sometimes dirty. But almost everyone agrees on at least one point: The corporate responsibility initiative is extremely complex from a legal perspective. These are questions of liability, due diligence obligations and burden of proof sharing; on legal subtleties, the consequences of which are sometimes difficult to assess. That makes the voting proposal one of the most complicated in recent years.
Too complicated indeed? The question is fundamental, and anyone who asks it should take a look at Germany. There, a prominent jurist opined that the group’s initiative was simply too much for the electorate: Professor Regina Ogorek of the University of Frankfurt.
In the spring of 2019 she was invited to a hearing of experts at the Bundestag in Berlin. The issue: direct democracy and whether it should be strengthened in the Federal Republic. But she, of all people, who taught in Zurich for years, is married to the well-known Swiss business lawyer Peter Forstmoser and knows the local system very well, acted as a warning voice. According to relevant polls, as a rule, only half of Swiss voters know exactly what it is about, Ogorek explained.
The professor also presented an essay on the subject to German MPs. The Swiss group’s initiative serves as a deterrent case study. Ogorek writes about an “unusually difficult technical-legal initiative text.” It is hardly possible to “even roughly understand its implications and assess the consequences of its transfer to legally binding norms”.
Therefore, there is a risk that “the respective instinct decides without the citizen knowing what he is doing.” In general, a common man does not even know what constitutes a corporation; “Like most lawyers, by the way,” Ogorek emphasizes. That is why, when voting, he makes the same decision as recommended by sources: opinion-makers such as parties, associations or even ecclesiastical representatives.
Ogorek concludes that when it comes to complicated matters, votes are almost never based on reliable knowledge of the voters. “In this way, fronts are not broken through dialogue, but the different perspectives in the camps are consolidated.”
Campaigns focus on simplification
In any case, in the referendum campaign, both camps rely on tried and tested simplification methods. Some call for morality, others warn of economic ruin: this is how Ogorek summed up the prevailing line of conflict as early as 2019. As a voter, you look at a myriad of arguments and have to decide which one he finds most plausible. If a yes or a no better expresses one’s will.
According to trend polls, opinion formation on the group’s initiative is well advanced. Faced with years of preliminary campaign-like skirmishes, sympathies or dislikes could almost ripen.
At the same time, voters struggling to get the full picture seem to be having a hard time understanding the content of the template. At least that’s what the discussions on forums and social networks suggest.
It is not so important to understand everything
But is it important to know every detail? Not necessarily, the relevant polls say. Swiss poll researchers have long since abandoned the ideal of the omniscient electorate. You have adequately addressed the question of how voters handle complex documents.
Simply put, the most important findings are as follows: A voter does not have to know everything about a bill. Rather, you can rely on recommendations for complex topics. Experts talk about heuristic calls. Many citizens take these abbreviations, as summarized by Lukas Golder of the GFS Bern research institute in this newspaper. They are aimed mainly at parties and associations, the Federal Council and the media, but also at family and friends. “By doing this, they are also mostly indirectly following your preferences,” says Golder. “This is a very effective way to exercise voting rights.”
It is important that voters can classify the arguments and draw the correct conclusions for them. In a large study, political scientist Hanspeter Kriesi was able to show in 2005 that voters can use these decision aids. By doing so, they could differentiate between the messages they find trustworthy and the ones that don’t. When it comes to presentations with complex topics, voters tend to trust recommendations, as voting analysis regularly shows.
Lost knowledge is replaced by trust
Finally, the political scientist Wolf Linder from Bern attests to the electorate “a high degree of ability to assess the different credibility of the various sources of information.” In a position paper for the German Heinrich Böll Foundation, he talks about a “general mechanism” to replace missing knowledge with confidence in proven sources.
Of course, this approach cannot only be observed in voting. Even a parliamentarian is only familiar with some files, recalls Linder. For many other questions, however, trust the experience of others. “If it is a vote, trust your neighbor at the bank or colleagues in the parliamentary group with whom you have had good experiences.”
