Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Date of Degree
6-2026
Document Type
Doctoral Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy
Program
History
Advisor
David Waldstreicher
Committee Members
Andrew Robertson
Helena Rosenblatt
Subject Categories
European History | Intellectual History | Political History | United States History
Abstract
This dissertation is not a history of two republics, but of the comparisons made between them. From the American founding through the Progressive Era, politicians, jurists, reformers, and scholars in both the United States and Switzerland repeatedly turned to the other country as a point of reference in domestic debates over constitutions, federalism, representation, democracy, and the problem of preserving union in divided societies. Rather than treating these comparisons as incidental rhetoric or tracing a simple line of institutional influence, this project examines them as political acts: arguments deployed to legitimize reform, defend existing arrangements, or imagine new forms of government.
Across four chapters covering the Founding Era, the making of the modern Swiss Confederation, the era of the Sonderbund War and the American Civil War, and the Progressive movement for direct democracy, the dissertation shows how each country served as a flexible constitutional mirror for the other. American observers looked to the Swiss cantons and confederation as examples of small republics, militia citizenship, and federal union; Swiss constitution-makers drew on the American model of bicameral federalism to reconcile cantonal sovereignty with national authority; both countries interpreted the experience of civil war through the lens of the other’s constitutional order; and late nineteenth-century American reformers explicitly invoked Switzerland as the leading example of the citizens’ initiative and referendum. In each case, foreign examples were not borrowed wholesale but adapted to local political struggles, making comparison itself a form of constitutional practice.
The project argues that this reciprocal habit of comparison was central to nineteenth-century republican thought. Constitutional development in both countries emerged not only from domestic traditions or abstract theory, but from sustained engagement with foreign examples that were interpreted, contested, and repurposed for local ends. By recovering this lost mode of political reasoning, the dissertation challenges national narratives of constitutional development and shows how comparison itself shaped the evolution of modern constitutional democracy.
Recommended Citation
Gambaccini, Alexander P., "The Politics of Comparisons: Constitutionalism and Democracy in Switzerland and the United States, 1760–1920" (2026). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/6776
Included in
European History Commons, Intellectual History Commons, Political History Commons, United States History Commons
