Conference

What is your blogger up to in Switzerland?

I wasn't sure when I arrived. At the invitation of Bruno Kaufmann, a Swiss-Swede journalist who heads the Initiative & Referendum Institute Europe (which is affiliated with a public university in Marburg, Germany), I was invited to a meeting of academics and journalists from around the world. A handful of journalists who arrived early took a tour around the country in the days before the conference. Now we're in Aarau, the first Napoleonic capital of Switzerland (it's a small city between Bern and Zurich), for the big meeting. Switzerland was the choice of site because more than 50 percent of all popular referenda and initiatives -- at the federal or national level of a country -- have taken place here. And Aarau has a brand-new center for the study of direct democracy.