On the Institutional Roots of Swiss Democracy
Advances in Economics and Business 4(8): 446-460, 2016 http://www.hrpub.org DOI: 10.13189/aeb.2016.040807 On the Institutional Roots of Swiss Democracy Gkanas Nikitas*, Kyriazis Nicholas Department of Economics, University of Thessaly, Greece Copyright©2016 by authors, all rights reserved. Authors agree that this article remains permanently open access under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 International License. Abstract Looking back at the history of Switzerland, we as part of the query how Switzerland was created. can identify some structural changes in the economic, social The aim of this research is to explain the emergence and and cultural environment, also in the spiritual perceptions establishment of democracy in Switzerland through a and attitudes of citizens. These may constituted the basis for synthetic compound of institutional variables. By the term the creation of specific standards and played a crucial role in institutional we mean institutions as North [10] defined: an the political and economic course of the country. In this enduring set of rules to ensure consistency of the social study we examine how institutions can explain the system, as the formal (business, syndicate unions, emergence and establishment of democracy in Switzerland. government bodies, local governments, schools), social We investigate various aspects of human activity in structures (such as legal system, political system, language, Switzerland trend since the beginning of its emergence, in money), informal institutions such convention rules1, moral order to use the tool of macro-culture that includes shared rules 2 , habits 3 , social values 4 (norms), cultural values values, norms and beliefs that characterize the members of a (culture) and routines.
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