Rappard’s The Government of Switzerland (1936) explains Swiss constitutionalism as a historical equilibrium, not a transferable model. Written for American students, it presents Switzerland as a small counterpart to the United States: an old republic, a federation built from local sovereignties, a source of the initiative and referendum, and a plural society whose neutrality partly recalls American isolation. Its thesis is that Swiss government lives by negotiated tensions—canton and Confederation, liberty and protection, representative and direct democracy, neutrality and collective security.
The opening chapter makes geography and population integral to constitutional interpretation. Switzerland’s Alpine position, dense settlement, dependence on foreign trade, migration, tourism, multilingualism, and religious division make government inseparable from international exposure and internal pluralism. Rappard rejects the idea that nationhood requires cultural homogeneity. Swiss nationality is made through cross-cutting differences, federal guarantees, and internal mobility:
a people formerly made up of the citizens of twenty-two allied cantons is more and more growing into one nation.
The historical chapters assign each regime its institutional “deposit”: medieval covenants and republican habits; the Helvetic Republic’s equality and multilingual citizenship; the reactions of 1803 and 1815; the cantonal revolutions of 1830 as the source of rights and popular control; 1848’s federal state and American-style bicameral legislature; 1874’s centralization, anticlericalism, direct democracy, stronger Federal Tribunal, and basis for social legislation. Yet local citizenship remains prior:
every citizen of a canton is a Swiss citizen.
Rappard’s comparison with America clarifies the Swiss difference. Cantons use unicameral legislatures, collegial executives, and direct-democratic devices, and they distrust personal rule and judicial supremacy. Federally, the Constitution gives the Assembly formal supremacy:
the supreme authority of the Confederation is exercised by the Federal Assembly.
But Rappard’s method moves from constitutional anatomy to political physiology. Technical legislation, committee procedure, proportional representation, and the stability of the seven-member Federal Council shift practical initiative from Parliament to the executive. The Federal Tribunal is important but unlike the American Supreme Court, since it cannot invalidate federal statutes. The referendum and initiative supply the popular counterweight: one acts chiefly as veto, the other as rarer constructive instrument, and both keep sovereignty visibly outside Parliament.
The party chapter continues this dynamic account. Liberal and radical progressives built the modern Confederation; Catholic conservatives moved from confessional resistance into coalition; socialism rose late with urban labor and public employees; agrarian and independent groups expressed depression-era discontent. Yet Swiss parties remain mainly cantonal because no presidential election nationalizes loyalty.
Domestic policy gives the book its sharpest warning. Rappard organizes modern legislation around four tendencies: emancipation of the individual, democratization, centralization, and expanding state intervention. The first two largely triumph by 1874; afterward the latter two dominate through military reform, legal unification, railways, banking, insurance, subsidies, and crisis administration. Staempfli’s phrase marks the democratic turn from formal freedom to material demand:
The stomach cannot be content with liberty and equality.
Rappard’s liberal anxiety is that Swiss democracy, while rejecting Marxist revolution, has embraced “étatisme,” a practical state socialism that protects, regulates, subsidizes, and borrows. His budgetary survey makes the warning empirical: war finance and postwar expectations enlarge revenue, expenditure, and debt until the welfare of the citizen begins to threaten his independence.
The final chapter applies the same logic of compromise to foreign policy. Neutrality arose after military overreach, hardened through confessional division, and was guaranteed in 1815. The World War confirmed it as the safeguard of territorial integrity and internal peace, while Red Cross work gave it moral dignity. League membership then posed the problem of reconciling neutrality with collective security: Switzerland accepted economic solidarity but not military sanctions or troop transit. Hence Rappard’s metaphor:
neutrality is the parachute which she will not abandon until international flying becomes safer.
The work remains relevant because it treats Swiss democracy neither as folklore nor machinery, but as a living settlement: local yet national, liberal yet statist, democratic yet expert-led, neutral yet internationally entangled.
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