1 Introduction

Patrick Emmenegger is a professor of comparative political economy and public policy at the University of St Gallen in Switzerland. His research focuses on the political economy of welfare and skills, labour market regulation, industrial relations, democratization, state-building, the politics of taxation, and institutional theory. He has published The Age of Dualization: The Changing Face of Inequality in Deindustrializing Societies (2012, Oxford University Press) and The Power to Dismiss: Trade Unions and the Regulation of Job Security in Western Europe (2014, Oxford University Press).

Flavia Fossati is an assistant professor of inequality and integration studies at the University of Lausanne (Switzerland) and at the Swiss Centre of Expertise in Life Course Research (CIR-LIVES). Previously, she has been appointed as an assistant professor of social policy at the University of Vienna. She has been a visiting fellow at EUI and Malmö University. Her research interests include social and immigration policies, deservingness and welfare state chauvinism, and survey experiments. Her research is published in, among others, Cambridge University Press, European Sociological Review, Socio-Economic Review, and International Migration Review. More information can be found here: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9218-5422.

Silja Häusermann is a professor of political science at the University of Zurich. She studies welfare state politics and party system change in advanced capitalist democracies. She directs the ERC project, ‘welfarepriorities’ and is the co-director of the UZH University Research Priority Programme ‘Equality of Opportunity’. She is the co-editor of The Politics of Advanced Capitalism (Cambridge University Press 2015) and The World Politics of Social Investment Vols I and II (Oxford University Press 2022). More information can be found here: www.siljahaeusermann.org.

Yannis Papadopoulos is a professor of Swiss politics and public policy at the Institute of Political Studies of the University of Lausanne and a member of the Laboratory for Analysis and Public Policy (LAGAPE). His research concentrates on recent developments in Swiss policy-making and on the broader implications of governance transformations for accountability and democracy. He has recently published Understanding Accountability in Democratic Governance (Elements series in Public policy, Cambridge University Press 2023) and co-edited the Handbuch der Schweizer Politik-Manuel de la politique suisse (NZZ Libro 2022).

Pascal Sciarini is a professor of Swiss and comparative politics and dean of the School of Social Sciences at the University of Geneva. His main research topics are decision-making processes, direct democracy, Europeanization, and electoral behaviour. His work has appeared in several journals, such as Comparative Political Studies, The Journal of Politics, British Journal of Political Science, European Journal of Political Research, West European Politics, Electoral Studies, and Social Networks. He is co-author of Political Decision-Making in Switzerland: The Consensus Model under Pressure (Palgrave Macmillan 2015).

Adrian Vatter is a full professor of political science (Swiss politics) at the Institute of Political Science, University of Bern. He studied political science and economics at the University of Bern and was professor at the University of Konstanz, Germany (2003–2007) and at the University of Zurich (2008–2009). He has published on Swiss politics, federalism, direct democracy, consensus democracy, subnational politics, and comparative public policy in leading journals. He is the author of Swiss Federalism (Routledge 2018) and Power Diffusion and Democracy (Cambridge University Press 2019; co-authored with Julian Bernauer).