Designed Buffers: How Swiss Institutions Decouple Elite Polarization from Mass Affective Hostility

Switzerland presents a puzzle for theories that link elite polarization to mass affective animosity. Over three decades the Swiss People's Party rose from roughly 15 to 28 percent of the vote, the Federal Council has moved from amicable agreement toward open elite conflict, and observers classify the party system as among the most ideologically divided in Western Europe. Yet new long-run survey and behavioural evidence shows that mass affective polarization rose once between 1999 and 2003 and has not moved since, while geographic vote congruence between local populations has increased. Standard psychological, informational, and elite-driven accounts cannot accommodate this decoupling. Through analytical case- mechanism tracing, this paper argues that Swiss institutional architecture functions as a designed buffer system: three coupled affordances absorb elite antagonism without permitting it to compound into ambient mass hostility. Federalism with strong subsidiarity provides identity-salience offsets that prevent partisanship from consolidating into a master identity.