Governance and Coercion

The present article departs from the assumption often found in literature concerning governance, which is that coercion is the quintessence of government and that, therefore, the growing importance of new forms of governance in policy formulation and implementation will lead to the adoption of softer policy instruments. This hypothesis will first be discussed in the wider context of the instrument choice literature, whereby an opposing view is derived. The two competing hypotheses are then tested in a comparison of the alcohol control policy designs of the Swiss member states, i.e. the cantons. The results of a multivariate regression analysis show that strong governance structures understood as networks embracing both public and private actors lead to the adoption of restrictive policy designs that must be enforced by public authority and as such cannot be employed by non-public governance actors. It is concluded that in their evaluation of policy instruments, governance actors follow a logic of consequentiality rather than a logic of appropriateness.