Gentlemen’s Agreements? Insiders and Outsiders in the Shaping of Swiss Financial Regulation

How do policy communities react to major crises? In order to address this question, this paper focuses on the involvement of financial industry groups and “outsiders” actors (i.e. non-financial interest groups, political parties) in the production of legislative norms and regulatory rules. Empirically, it focuses on policy-making in relation to Swiss financial regulation, an area that has been traditionally associated with technical complexity, low issue salience and high levels of private self-regulation. In particular, the paper focuses on the intensity and diversity of financial industry groups and “outsiders” mobilization in the different stages of the policy-making process. By means of an issue-tracing approach, this paper analyzes the involvement of financial industry groups and outsider actors in policy-making across three distinct levels: primary legislation (i.e. enacted by Parliament), secondary legislation (i.e. enacted by the government) and rules enacted by independent regulatory agencies. Analyses rely on the quantitative assessment of consultations and hearings before and after the Global Financial Crisis, allowing the contrast between periods of relatively low and high issue salience. In order to capture the variance existing within a single policy sector despite general bursts of public attention, the article takes into consideration the entire financial regulatory production to compare between different financial regulatory issues.