It's not about Switzerland's size. It's about its bottom-up political structure. The cantons hold more political and economical power than the federation. It's

It's not about Switzerland's size. It's about its bottom-up political structure. The cantons hold more political and economical power than the federation. It's so local-first that there are stories of people who were denied Swiss citizenship basically because their neighbors considered the person to be not aligned with the community values. Policies are defined almost at a district level. Comparing with the other "big" countries in Europe, there is no distant bureaucracy enacting laws affecting subjects that are not on the same sphere. The USA was built on the same idea, where states have a lot more direct power than the federal government, but that idea is basically lost because people on both sides of the political spectrum have been pushing for more centralization and federal control.