Fabrizio Gilardi's research while affiliated with University of Zurich and other places
What is this page?
This page lists the scientific contributions of an author, who either does not have a ResearchGate profile, or has not yet added these contributions to their profile.
It was automatically created by ResearchGate to create a record of this author's body of work. We create such pages to advance our goal of creating and maintaining the most comprehensive scientific repository possible. In doing so, we process publicly available (personal) data relating to the author as a member of the scientific community.
If you're a ResearchGate member, you can follow this page to keep up with this author's work.
If you are this author, and you don't want us to display this page anymore, please let us know.
It was automatically created by ResearchGate to create a record of this author's body of work. We create such pages to advance our goal of creating and maintaining the most comprehensive scientific repository possible. In doing so, we process publicly available (personal) data relating to the author as a member of the scientific community.
If you're a ResearchGate member, you can follow this page to keep up with this author's work.
If you are this author, and you don't want us to display this page anymore, please let us know.
Publications (86)
Are digital technologies leveling the playing field or reinforcing existing power relations and structures? This question lies at the core of the equalization vs. normalization debate. The equalization thesis states that the affordances of digital technologies help less-powerful political actors to compete with their more resource-rich counterparts...
The shift of public debate to the digital sphere has been accompanied by a rise in online hate speech. While many promising approaches for hate speech classification have been proposed, studies often focus only on a single language, usually English, and do not address three key concerns: post-deployment performance, classifier maintenance and infra...
Social media companies are introducing new features for users to monetize engagements, derived from blockchain-based decentralized social media. These steps are potentially worrisome. The monetization of engagements might create incentives to post objectionable content. However, it is unclear to what extent such negative outcomes are likely to occu...
Content moderation — the regulation of the material that users create and disseminate online — is an important activity for all social media platforms. While routine, this practice raises significant questions linked to democratic accountability and civil liberties. Following the decision of many platforms to ban Donald J. Trump in the aftermath of...
This element shows, based on a review of the literature, how digital technology has affected liberal democracies with a focus on three key aspects of democratic politics: political communication, political participation, and policy-making. The impact of digital technology permeates the entire political process, affecting the flow of information amo...
This element shows, based on a review of the literature, how digital technology has affected liberal democracies with a focus on three key aspects of democratic politics: political communication, political participation, and policy-making. The impact of digital technology permeates the entire political process, affecting the flow of information amo...
In the 2019 Swiss federal elections, women's representation increased more than at any time before, reaching an all‐time high at 42%. In this article, we offer several explanations for this. First, in almost all parties, the percentage of female candidates was significantly larger than in the previous elections. Second, on average female candidates...
The 2019 Swiss national elections were characterized by the unusual prominence of two issues, environment and gender, whereas two staples of Swiss politics, immigration and Europe, were less dominant compared to previous elections. We study how, in this context, the media and party agenda were linked to issue ownership. Specifically, we consider wh...
Despite heightened awareness of the detrimental impact of hate speech on social media platforms on affected communities and public discourse, there is little consensus on approaches to mitigate it. While content moderation—either by governments or social media companies—can curb online hostility, such policies may suppress valuable as well as illic...
The relationship between digital technology and politics is an important phenomenon that remains poorly understood due to several structural problems. A key issue is the lack of adequate research infrastructures or the lack of access. This article discusses the challenges many social scientists face and presents the infrastructure we built in Switz...
We study the role of social media in debates regarding two policy responses to COVID-19 in Switzerland: face-mask rules and contact-tracing apps. We use a dictionary classifier to categorize 612'177 tweets by parties, politicians, and the public as well as 441'458 articles published in 76 newspapers between February and August 2020. We distinguish...
What is the role of social media in political agenda setting? Digital platforms have reduced the gatekeeping power of traditional media and, potentially, they have increased the capacity of various kinds of actors to shape the agenda. We study this question in the Swiss context by examining the connections between three agendas: the traditional med...
We put forward a new approach to studying issue definition within the context of policy diffusion. Most studies of policy diffusion—which is the process by which policymaking in one government affects policymaking in other governments—have focused on policy adoptions. We shift the focus to an important but neglected aspect of this process: the issu...
Die Selects Medienstudie 2019 erforscht den Wahlkampf in den traditionellen und digitalen Medien in der Schweiz. Dabei setzt sie auf eine automatisierte Themenklassifizierung bei den Zeitungsartikeln sowie auf einen in dieser Form erstmaligen Zugang zu den Online-Auftritten der Kandidierenden in den sozialen Medien Facebook und Twitter. Erste Erken...
Diese Abhandlung bespricht die digitale Transformation der Demokratie, mit einem Fokus auf die Schweiz und ihre direktdemokratischen Institutionen. Im ersten Teil werden drei Aspekte der „digitalen Demokratie“ thematisiert, wobei der direktdemokratische Kontext der Schweiz in Verbindung mit der internationalen Literatur gebracht wird. Die drei Aspe...
Das Digital Demcracy Lab (DigDemLab) der Universität Zürich hat eine aufwendige Umfrage realisiert, die es erlaubt, die Struktur der öffentlichen Meinung zur eID genauer zu analysieren. Eine deutliche Mehrheit der Schweizer*innen (vier von fünf) will, dass der Staat die elektronische Identität (eID) herausgibt. Damit ist das Gesetz zur Schaffung de...
There is a persistent gender gap in motivations to run for political office. While exposure to role models is widely believed to increase women’s political ambition, there is little field experimental evidence on whether exposure to female politicians in realistic settings can increase political ambition. We conducted a field experiment in which a...
We discuss the recent literature on policy diffusion and put forward a new articulation of its political dimensions. Policy diffusion means that policies in one unit (country, state, city, etc.) are influenced by the policies of other units. The diffusion literature conceptualises these interdependencies with four mechanisms: learning, competition,...
We study gender bias in media coverage of candidates during election campaigns. Our analysis focuses on the 2015 Swiss national elections and relies on an almost comprehensive sample of print and online news items covering the full duration of the campaign, including over 200,000 documents from 70 sources and all 3,927 candidates. First, we analyze...
This paper studies how female candidates are covered by newspapers during election campaigns. Previous studies have generally found that the media portray men and women quite similarly, but they have tended to use relatively selective sources and to focus on the amount of coverage and its tone, but not on on its content. We aim to gain a more nuanc...
Policy diffusion occurs when policies in one unit (e.g., countries, states, cities) are influenced by the prior adoption of policies in other units. Although numerous studies have convincingly documented this phenomenon, they have, with very few exceptions, generally ignored a crucial step in the diffusion process—namely, how policies are framed ah...
This article puts forward four strategies to improve policy diffusion research in political science: (1) use existing concepts consistently and improve their measurement, (2) clarify whether the goal is to improve the understanding of diffusion itself or to use diffusion research to explain another phenomenon, (3) pay more attention to the quality...
This article investigates the supply side of women's political representation by focusing on how the election of female politicians affects the motivation of women to run for office in other units. The analysis relies on an original data set of over 1,500 municipal elections in Switzerland, starting with the first election after the introduction of...
Policy diffusion occurs when policies in one unit (e.g., states, cantons, cities) are influenced by the prior adoption of policies in other units. Although numerous studies have convincingly shown that policy adoption is a function of previous adoptions in other units, they have, with very few exceptions, generally ignored a crucial step in the dif...
The Arab Spring has become a prominent example of the spread of cross-national regime contention. It is widely accepted that successful regime contention (in Tunisia and Egypt) triggered protests in other countries. Both scholars and other observers have suggested that protesters learned from successful regime contention. Thus far, available eviden...
A growing literature in public policy, comparative politics and international relations has studied how the policies of one unit (e.g. country, federal state or city) are influenced by the policies of other units - that is, how policies diffuse. This article provides a meta-analysis of 114 studies, demonstrating persisting inconsistencies in the me...
European regulatory networks (ERNs) are in charge of producing and disseminating non-bindings standards, guidelines and recommendations in a number of important domains, such as banking and finance, electricity and gas, telecommunications, and competition regulation. The goal of these soft rules is to promote ‘best practices’, achieve co-ordination...
Policy diffusion means that policy choices in one unit (such as states, cantons, and cities) are influenced by the policy choices of other units. This idea has been studied extensively in several social sciences and, within political science, in subfields such as international relations, American federalism, and public policy. While scholars have d...
Tax competition is the quintessential example of policy interdependence. The general idea is that tax changes in one jurisdiction lead to similar changes in others. However, research has shown that institutional and political constraints limit competition. This article develops another argument: that socialization among policy makers attenuates com...
Since independent regulatory agencies (IRAs) became key actors in European regulatory governance in the 1990s, a significant share of policy-making has been carried out by organizations that are neither democratically elected nor directly accountable to elected politicians. In this context, public communication plays an important role. On the one h...
Policy making takes place in a context of interdependence. This statement is uncontroversial and there are many examples of cases in which decision-makers in one country (or state, city and so on) are somehow influenced by the choices made in other countries (or states, cities, and so on). For instance, consider the following exchange on ‘Big Socie...
Tax competition is the quintessential example of policy interdependence. The general idea is that tax reductions in one jurisdiction lead to similar changes in others. However, research has shown that institutional and political constraints limit competition. In this article, we develop another argument, namely that socialization among policy maker...
European regulatory networks (ERNs) constitute the main governance instrument for the informal co-ordination of public regulation at the European Union (EU) level. They are in charge of co-ordinating national regulators and ensuring the implementation of harmonized regulatory policies across the EU, while also offering sector-specific expertise to...
Insulation from direct political pressure has become the cornerstone of economic regulation in most countries. Delegation of powers to institutions that cannot be controlled by elected politicians is expected to enhance the credibility of policy commitments and the effectiveness of regulation. However, whether independence permits to achieve these...
This chapter offers a theoretical and empirical assessment of the distinctive feature of regulatory agencies, namely their independence. First, we discuss the formal and informal aspects of regulatory independence, their conceptualization, and their operationalization. Second, we present empirical research explaining the variation of formal indepen...
The reform of the welfare state is one of the most widely studied topics in political science, but the literature is deficient in at least two respects. Firstly, scholars have tended to focus on income-replacement programs and to neglect the health care field, despite the importance of health care expenses for public budgets and despite the signifi...
The increase of health-care expenditures has been one of the most pressing problems for European welfare states. To counter this trend, many countries have introduced or strengthened cost-sharing policies, shifting some of the costs from public budgets to patients. In this paper, we investigate the spread of a specific form of cost sharing, namely...
The idea that policy makers in different states or countries may learn from one another has fascinated scholars for a long time, but little systematic evidence has been produced so far. This article improves our understanding of this elusive argument by distinguishing between the policy and political consequences of reforms and by emphasizing the c...
This article compares the scientific publication output and international academic visibility of Swiss political science departments, using three indicators (number of publications, number of citations, and the h-index) and publicly available data from two sources: the ISI Web of Knowledge and Google Scholar. We also examine whether the publication...
Tax competition, the quintessential example of policy interdependence, has so far been studied predominantly with a focus on the competitive pressure faced by policy makers. The general idea is that the external effects of a tax reduction pressure other governments to cut taxes themselves. However, empirically it is not straightforward which jurisd...
The increase in health care expenditures is a major problem of all welfare states. To counter this trend, since the early 1980s, most OECD countries have changed the way hospitals are financed. Although these reforms are certainly linked to country-specific factors, the authors' main argument is that they are in part due to a diffusion process: Pol...
Welfare state retrenchment may occur as a consequence of explicit cuts in social benefits, but also because exisiting policies are insuffi-ciently adapted to evolving social needs, or, in other words, policy drift. When this happens, social risks that were previously borne by collec-tive actors become increasingly individualized, or privatized. Rec...
Abstract In tax competition processes, do policy makers react to the choices of others, or do they strategically anticipate them? Using data on personal income tax rates in Swiss cantons and spatial methods, we nd that cantons compete especially for taxpayers in higher in- come categories, and that the evidence is consistent with both chain reactio...
The recent establishment of European networks of independent regulatory agencies (IRAs) follows, in principle, a double process of delegation of public authority: from member state governments to national regulators, and from national regulators to European networks. Following this development, a number of questions emerge, concerning the effect of...
Policy diffusion is a common phenomenon in federal states: indeed, one of the normative justifications of decentralized policy making is that it permits the development and spread of best practices. Following Berry and Berry (1990), event-history analysis has been the method of choice for the quantitative investigation of policy diffusion, but Vold...
This paper surveys what is new in the study of the international diffusion of policies. We critically review the most recent contributions on the topic, trying to identify the substantive and methodological novelties in this literature. Regarding mechanisms, we argue that whereas there is acknowledgement that they overlap, there is hardly any atten...
'Fabrizio Gilardi's book is empirical political science of the regulatory state at its best. It has data of transnational breadth and depth that is diagnosed in a theoretically sophisticated way. The conclusion is that policy makers delegate in order to tighten the credibility of policy commitments and to tie the hands of future ministers who may h...
Analyzing the changing boundaries between the public and the private spheres in the welfare state is particularly interesting in the Swiss case. In fact, the role of the private sector has always been important in social policymaking in this country, many decades before the contemporary pushes for privatization and market-based social protection in...
Independent regulatory agencies are the institutional foundations of the regulatory state that, during the past 15 years, has gained prominence throughout Europe. This article studies the rise of independent authorities in European countries by comparing regulatory agencies and central banks. Delegation to independent central banks and to independe...
Policy diffusion can be defined as a process in which policy choices are interdependent, that is, in which a choice made by
one decision-maker influences the choices made by other decision-makers, and is in turn influenced by them. So defined, diffusion
is both an old and a new phenomenon. It is old because interdependencies have always existed. Th...
This article builds on the recent policy diffusion literature and attempts to overcome one of its major problems, namely the lack of a coherent theoretical framework. The literature defines policy diffusion as a process where policy choices are interdependent, and identifies several diffusion mechanisms that specify the link between the policy choi...
One of the most notable characteristics of the change in governance of the past two decades has been the restructuring of the state, most notably the delegation of authority from politicians and ministries to technocrats and regulatory agencies. Our unique dataset on the extent of these reforms in seven sectors in 36 countries reveals the widesprea...
Delegation is an ubiquitous social phenomenon linked to the growing differentiation of modern societies. Delegation is one of several different modes of organisation that exist to make collective action successful, but has been overlooked and under-researched.
Using a rational choice institutional analysis and principal agent models, this book bri...
This article seeks to explain the pattern of delegation to independent regulatory agencies in Western Europe. Two types of arguments are advanced to explain variations in the formal independence of regulators. Firstly, the need for governments to increase their credible commitment capacity may lead them to delegate regulation to an agency that is p...
This article studies the diffusion of the main institutional feature of regulatory capitalism, namely, independent regulatory agencies. While only a few such authorities existed in Europe in the early 1980s, by the end of the twentieth century they had spread impressively across countries and sectors. The analysis finds that three classes of factor...
Independent regulatory agencies (IRAs) have become the most widespread form of organisation for regulatory policies in Western Europe. Their pattern of emergence suggests that a diffusion process may have been at work, namely a process where the decisions to set up IRAs have not been independent. This paper investigates whether the spread of IRAs i...
Independent regulatory agencies are one of the main institutional features of the 'rising regulatory state' in Western Europe. Governments are increasingly willing to abandon their regulatory competencies and to delegate them to specialized institutions that are at least partially beyond their control. This article examines the empirical consistenc...
Although principal-agent models have been extensively used by American political scientists for now more than twenty years, their application to the European context is much more recent. This paper discusses this evolution and argues that the principal-agent framework provides useful but insufficient insights into our understanding of independent r...
Tax competition is the quintessential example of policy interdependence. The general idea is that external effects of tax reductions pressure other governments to cut taxes themselves. Yet political scientist have shown that institutional and political constraints counter such competitive pressures. We add to this literature another argument, namel...
Abstract will be provided by author.
Independent regulatory agencies are one of the main institutional features of the "rising regulatory state". In fact, governments are increasingly willing to abandon their regulatory competencies and to delegate them to specialised institutions that are beyond their control. This paper examines the empirical consistency of one widely accepted expla...
Abstract will be provided by author.
Tax competition is the quintessential example of policy interdependence but, under- standably, it has been studied predominantly with a focus on the competitive pressures faced by policy makers. However, the recent diusion literature suggests that tax policies may diuse for reasons other than competition; for instance, intergovernmental institution...
Abstract will be provided by author.
Citations
... Analyzing Facebook posts by campaign actors and user reactions to these posts before 91 votes in Switzerland from 2010 to 2020, Fischer and Gilardi (2023) found that the amount of Facebook activities before referendum campaigns increases over time. Strikingly, users engage with campaigns of the challenger camp about as much as with those of pro-government campaigns. ...
... The resulting categories and conceptual frameworks provided language that the researchers, policymakers, and practitioners can use to communicate. This was accomplished through a nomothetic approach used to generalize the phenomenon, understand it as a whole, and make sense of it in comparison to other similar phenomena (e.g., CSs for international students provided in other countries; Maggetti et al., 2013). In a nomothetic approach, the concepts generated do not have a meaning but are attributed a meaning based on the applied perspectives and interpretations (Maggetti et al., 2013). ...
![[object Object]](https://i1.rgstatic.net/ii/profile.image/758463936348161-1557843302216_Q64/Claudio-Radaelli.jpg)
... Changing elements of the system, such as the actors or communication channels, involves banning actors in marketer-consumer exchanges that abuse the system by creating and purveying fake news. This essentially is what Twitter did when it banned President Donald Trump after the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. capitol (Alizadeh et al., 2021). Eliminating communication channels such as social networks is a difficult intervention best enacted at the level of public policy. ...
![[object Object]](https://i1.rgstatic.net/ii/profile.image/701586552655872-1544282677296_Q64/Emma-Hoes-2.jpg)
![[object Object]](https://i1.rgstatic.net/ii/profile.image/921461745274881-1596705008102_Q64/Jonathan-Klueser.jpg)
... Furthermore, a reinforced polarisation of the left and right-wing positions along the political spectrum has an effect on online discourse. This suggests that the possible impacts of polarisation in society or on social media lead to heightened attention to the topic, especially as the year 2019 was also an election year in Switzerland and gave rise to a surge in women's political representation (Giger et al. 2021). During our observation period, other strikes (e.g., climate change mobilisations) and popular votes (e.g., preparation of the campaign for the popular vote on paternity leave in September 2020) may also have impacted the content of online discussions. ...
![[object Object]](https://i1.rgstatic.net/ii/profile.image/279173022142465-1443571443478_Q64/Denise-Traber-2.jpg)
... Instead, recent findings have also shown that public issue salience is partially determined by exogenous events and trends independently of political and media cues (Singer, 2011;Klüver and Sagarzazu, 2016;McAllister and bin Oslan, 2021;Dennison, 2019Dennison, , 2020Gilardi et al., 2021;Seeberg, 2017;. Media agenda-setting-outside of mediating the effects of and framing exogenous social trends and events-is constrained in its selection of what issues to cover (Amsalem and Zoizner, 2022;Pritchard and Berkowitz, 1993;Gentzkow and Shapiro, 2010) and follows more than influences both public trends and political actors (Zoizner et al., 2017;Kleinnijenhuis and Rietberg, 1995;Brandenburg, 2002;Soroka, 2003). ...
![[object Object]](https://i1.rgstatic.net/ii/profile.image/11431281120964336-1676730546898_Q64/Theresa-Gessler.jpg)
![[object Object]](https://i1.rgstatic.net/ii/profile.image/11431281105398844-1670404984769_Q64/Stefan-Mueller-9.jpg)
... Counter speech refers to direct responses (e.g., comments, replies, etc.) to hateful content that are aimed "to stop it, reduce its consequences, discourage it, as well as to support the victim and fellow counter speakers, and ultimately increase civility and deliberation quality of online discussions" (Garland et al., 2022). Like hate speech, counter speech can take many forms, such as providing facts, pointing out logical inconsistencies in hateful messages, supporting victims, or even flooding the discussion with neutral or unrelated content (Hangartner et al., 2021). In a study that compared the effectiveness of diverse types of counter speech, Hangartner and colleagues (2021) found that the use of empathy in counter speech within the comments section was more consistently effective in defusing hateful discourse compared to the use of humour and warnings of consequences. ...
... Preprocessing in text-as-data analysis is an essential preparation step that reduces unwanted noise in the unstructured raw text data. There are many available options for preprocessing, providing researchers with di erent techniques of handling the text corpus: Removing stopwords, lemmatization, stemming, lowercase, or tokenization are all methods that convert the raw data into data that is more suitable for automated analyses (Gilardi & Wüest, 2018;Haddi et al., 2013;Naseem et al., 2021;Pustejovsky & Stubbs, 2012). The combination and running order of these steps can also a ect the performance of the analysis. ...
![[object Object]](https://i1.rgstatic.net/ii/profile.image/277643518857221-1443206781294_Q64/Bruno-Wueest.jpg)
... For the three data sets, this results in 77,284 tweets (excluding retweets), 1,148,101 articles from 80 newspapers and 2,115 press releases. All data was collected daily through an ingestion system distributed over multiple machines which collects the data from the different sources and immediately stores it in a database (Gilardi et al., 2021a). We include the following parties in the analysis: SVP (Swiss People's Party), SP (Social Democratic Party), FDP (Liberal Party), CVP (Christian Democratic Party), Greens, and GLP (Green Liberal Party). ...
![[object Object]](https://i1.rgstatic.net/ii/profile.image/689596450996229-1541424014444_Q64/Clau-Dermont.jpg)
... Die bisherigen Studien zur Nutzung von sozialen Medien im politischen Kontext der Schweiz konzentrieren sich hauptsächlich auf die Nutzung dieser neuen Technologien und auf die Einflusskanäle durch die Parlamentsmitglieder selbst (siehe u. a. Klinger 2013; Rauchfleisch und Metag 2016). Soziale Medien, deren Bedeutung für die öffentliche Meinungsbildung stetig zunimmt, werden so auch für den politischen Entscheidungsprozess immer wichtiger und rücken zunehmend in den Mittelpunkt des wissenschaftlichen Interesses (siehe u. a. Gilardi et al. 2021). Die Nutzung von Sozialen Medien durch Interessengruppen in der Schweiz sind daher ein interessantes Gebiet für zukünftige Forschung. ...
Reference: Lobbyismus in der Schweiz
... In contrast, during non-breaking news periods, newspapers guide Twitter's agenda. It was also found that cross-media agendas of news media articles and political actors on Twitter are interrelated (Gilardi et al., 2022). While debates on Twitter are often only led by a loud minority of users, we argue that the specific composition of highly relevant and influential users, as well as cross-media receptions beyond the platform, make climate discourses on Twitter relevant objects of study to understand how climate change is publicly negotiated. ...
