Switzerland: Contentious Citizenship Attribution in a Federal State

Whereas in most countries citizenship attribution is regulated at the central level of the state, in Switzerland each municipality is accorded the right to decide who can become a Swiss citizen. As the regulations at the national level are very sparse, even villages of as few as 400 inhabitants are empowered to establish formal procedures and criteria by which its alien residents are to be naturalized. Consequentially, naturalization policies and rejection rates vary significantly from one municipality to another. The goal of this paper is to explore naturalization processes from a comparative perspective and to explain why some municipalities pursue more restrictive citizenship policies than others. The Swiss case provides a unique opportunity for studying how membership criteria are established in negotiation processes between local politicians, and for understanding how such processes are influenced by municipal actors’ varying perspectives on citizenship. An innovative theoretical framework, integrating Bourdieu’s concepts of ‘field’ and ‘capital’, combines symbolic and material aspects of naturalization to explain differences between municipalities. The paper uses data collected in 14 case studies and 180 semi-structured interviews with local politicians.