Footnote 2, Chapter 8, Page 242:

Some more information regarding historical cleavages in Switzerland is provided in the following passage: Jonathan Steinberg explains that the Swiss have experienced religious and ethnic tensions for centuries and class conflict entered this mix in the twentieth century, most vividly exemplified by the General Strike in 1918 that seemingly “threatened the unity of the state and of society.” Political party allegiances partly related to this class conflict motivated an additional firmly entrenched division which resulted in similar electoral shares for the main parties for most of the twentieth century. Lehmbruch explains that “most of the cantons were religiously homogeneous from the beginning of modern Switzerland” and discusses the relationship between these multiple cleavages: “The Swiss case is peculiar insofar as the segmented organizational networks of the minority groups (Catholics and Socialists) were in turn horizontally fragmented by regional and linguistic cleavages that are institutionally entrenched in the cantonal organization of the Swiss federal system.”