The elections to the Swiss Federal Council in December 2015 re-established a system of party-centred concordance, cherished in consociational theory, consisting of two representatives of the Swiss People's Party, two Radicals, two Social Democrats and one Christian Democrat. At the same time, the government has rarely been as unbalanced in terms of the representation of Switzerland's languages and regions. The article analyses the concept of concordance with regard to both aspects of governmental inclusiveness. It also highlights the crucial role of electoral rules used in governmental elections. It argues that they resemble the Alternative Vote, a majoritarian electoral system that has been criticized in consociational theory but prescribed by the rival, centripetalist approach to power sharing.

The packaging materials industry has already recognized the importance of Total Productive Maintenance as a system of proactive techniques for improving equipment reliability. Bearing faults, which often occur gradually, represent one of the foremost causes of failures in the industry. Therefore, detection of their faults in an early stage is quite important to assure reliable and efficient operation. We present a new automated technique for early fault detection and diagnosis in rolling-element bearings based on vibration signal analysis. Following the wavelet decomposition of vibration signals into a few sub-bands of interest, the standard deviation of obtained wavelet coefficients is extracted as a representative feature. Then, the feature space dimension is optimally reduced to two using scatter matrices. In the reduced two-dimensional feature space the fault detection and diagnosis is carried out by quadratic classifiers. Accuracy of the technique has been tested on four classes of the recorded vibrations signals, i.e., normal, with the fault of inner race, outer race, and ball operation. The overall accuracy of 98.9% has been achieved. The new technique can be used to support maintenance decision-making processes and, thus, to increase reliability and efficiency in the industry by preventing unexpected faulty operation of bearings.