Despite increasing attention on congruence in recent democracy studies, the empirical linkage between the representative and the represented on the subnational level has been somewhat neglected. With federal arrangements, like in Switzerland, where municipalities are legally empowered by the federal and state governments to provide administrative services directly to their citizens, analyzing the proximity between local policymakers and local citizens is of value in estimating democracy’s legitimacy. With its neutral tradition and the marginal influence of supranational institutions like the EU, Switzerland provides an ideal opportunity to closely examine the link between citizens and the political elite on the municipal level, which has been barely covered in comparative democracy studies. In this paper, I aim to define and estimate municipal congruence in environmental policy in Switzerland, employing the logic of fuzzy-set membership score, and will argue how this new framework can be fruitful for future research.
