4 ms·

Don't get me wrong, I love the Swiss model of lots of referenda, very strong regional (canton) govt and a seven person executive, but also.. Swiss women didn't

• herbst 3y ago
  That's the other side of the book I guess. There are plenty more examples like this. Imagine getting only men to vote yes to lose 50% of their voting power. Imagine getting a million farmers and their family's to vote for a drastic new way in ecological farming. Same issue, different times.
• agurk 3y ago
  > Swiss women didn't get the vote at federal level until 1991 To be pedantic it was one Canton (Appenzell Innerrhoden) that the supreme court finally forced to let women have full voting rights, as in the rest if the Cantons, in 1990 [0]. So it was part of the state forcing this rather than through their direct democracy, which makes the issue even more interesting. The other states were still slow at granting universal suffrage, Vaud being the first in 1959. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_suffrage_in_Switzerland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_suffrage_in_Switzerl...
  • hkt 3y ago
    That is interesting - as you can tell I only had a shallow knowledge of it. I'll read more about how it works. Thanks!
• Viliam1234 3y ago
  And yet, the Swiss women pre-1991 were probably more free than women in some communist country who technically had the right to vote decades earlier... but they were only allowed to vote for the Communist Party, because there was no other option on the ballot.