Switzerland's Magic Formula for Sharing Power

The Swiss Federal Council is the country's executive: seven members, elected by the parliament every four years, with the presidency rotating among them annually. The presidency is mostly ceremonial. What matters is the seven-seat split.

Since 1959 that split has followed an informal arrangement called the Zauberformel — the Magic Formula. Two seats went to the Free Democrats, two to the Christian Democrats (now Die Mitte), two to the Social Democrats, and one to the Swiss People's Party (SVP). The ratios roughly matched the parties' parliamentary share at the time the formula was struck.

The formula is not law. It is a convention. Parliament could ignore it in any election, and almost never does. The biggest disruption came in 2003, when the SVP — having grown into the largest party by vote share — demanded and received a second seat at the expense of the Christian Democrats. The ratio became 1-2-2-2. When the SVP expelled the economist Christoph Blocher in 2008, the seat he held stayed briefly with a breakaway party, creating an unusual five-party split until the ratios returned to standard form by 2015.

The effect is that Switzerland's executive includes every major political tendency at once. Cabinet members vote in a collegiate body, disagreements are resolved behind closed doors, and the Council's outgoing decision is the government's position regardless of each minister's party.

No Swiss election, therefore, changes the executive in the way a French or British one does. The country runs its politics in the parliament and its policy in a permanent cross-partisan coalition that has outlasted almost every other democracy's governing arrangement in the world.