Laurence Brandenberger

Last Name

Brandenberger

First Name

Laurence

ORCID

0000-0003-0392-9766

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Publications 1 - 10 of 12

Why Online does not Equal Offline: Comparing Online and Real-World Political Support Among Politicians
Brandenberger, Laurence; Casiraghi, Giona; Andres, Georges; et al. (2021)
SocArXiv
Are offline political relations and endorsements established or maintained with online interactions? We examine the external validity of data on political behavior exhibited online and compare it to offline behavior. We overlay two data sets on political support among members of the Swiss parliament to estimate the explanatory power of online endorsements on offline cosponsorship signatures among members, using a gHypEG network regression model. Whereas offline support behavior is driven by a broad range of factors, such as network and homophily effects, online endorsement is less diverse. Our findings show that online endorsement is predominantly driven by partisanship, calling into question the use of online political behavior data to study real-world politics.
Helping a Friend or Supporting a Cause? Disentangling Active and Passive Cosponsorship in the U.S. Congress
Russo, Giuseppe; Gote, Christoph; Brandenberger, Laurence; et al. (2023)
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 1: Long Papers
In the U.S. Congress, legislators can use active and passive cosponsorship to support bills.We show that these two types of cosponsorship are driven by two different motivations: the backing of political colleagues and the backing of the bill’s content.To this end, we develop an Encoder+RGCN based model that learns legislator representations from bill texts and speech transcripts. These representations predict active and passive cosponsorship with an F1-score of 0.88.Applying our representations to predict voting decisions, we show that they are interpretable and generalize to unseen tasks.
Comparing Online and Offline Political Support
Brandenberger, Laurence; Casiraghi, Giona; Andres, Georges; et al. (2022)
Swiss Political Science Review
Do politicians carry on their interpersonal relations online? We examine how online political support compares to offline support. We overlay two data sets on political support among members of the Swiss National Council to estimate the explanatory power of online endorsements on offline cosponsorship signatures among members, using a gHypEG network regression model. Whereas offline support behavior is driven by a broad range of factors, such as network and homophily effects, endorsement is less diverse. Our findings show that online endorsement is predominantly driven by partisanship and does not mirror the richness found in offline support behavior.
Toward sustainable policy instruments: assessing instrument selection among policy actors
Glaus, Anik; Wiedemann, Ruth; Brandenberger, Laurence (2022)
Journal of Environmental Planning and Management
To address complex environmental problems we need sustainable policy solutions, which are often disregarded by policy actors in charge of addressing these problems. In this article, we study factors that promote or hinder policy actors' selection for sustainable policy instruments using the case of flood risk management in Switzerland. We evaluate flood risk management instruments based on three key sustainability dimensions and forgo conventional approaches to categorizing policy instruments. In a survey, we ask policy actors which policy instruments they prefer and thus evaluate which policy actors select sustainable policy instruments. Results indicate that problem perception is the key determinant influencing policy actors' selection of sustainable flood risk management instruments. Results also suggest that the tendency to select sustainable flood risk management instruments differs depending on actor type and actor level. These findings help us understand which settings promote the selection of sustainable policy solutions to tackle complex environmental problems.
Boundary Spanning Through Engagement of Policy Actors in Multiple Issues
Brandenberger, Laurence; Ingold, Karin; Fischer, Manuel; et al. (2022)
Policy Studies Journal
Prominent current policy problems such as climate change, migration, or the financial crisis embrace a multitude of issues that are tackled within single- or multiple-policy subsystems. However, interdependencies among actors that arise due to their multi-issue engagement are often discounted when studying policy processes, including learning dynamics and alliance or trust formation among actors engaged in multiple issues. Various issues compete for actors' attention, and actors need to choose an appropriate set of issues to deal with given their scarce resources. In this, why do actors engage in multiple issues? We present an innovative inductive approach that identifies policy issues related to Swiss water politics and actors involved therein. We use a two-mode exponential random graph model to estimate actors' multi-issue activity. Results show that 39% of actors engage in more than one water-related issue and that cross-subsystem and homophily clustering and clustered issue popularity drive this issue engagement.
Policy Networks Across Political Systems
Metz, Florence; Brandenberger, Laurence (2023)
American Journal of Political Science
Polities shape power structures and interaction patterns between actors in policymaking processes. Although the social fabric of interactions is key to successful policymaking, it remains unclear which relational structures are typically found across political systems. By adopting a network approach, we analyse differences in power structures and interaction patterns across four policy networks in German and Swiss consensual-federal, French majoritarian-unitary, and hybrid Dutch consensual-unitary democracies. Using survey data from 149 state and non-state actors, we fit exponential random graph models and calculate predicted probabilities to compare the four networks. Results show that the consensus democracies institutionalize neighbourhoods of networks where actors share power and collaborate with opponents. Our case of a majoritarian democracy illustrates power concentration with restricted access to competitors, limiting the need to interact and search for compromises with opponents. Findings allow future work to differentiate typical from atypical network structures, given the embeddedness into a political system.
Decision-making Networks Across Political Systems
Metz, Florence; Brandenberger, Laurence (2018)
Quantifying triadic closure in multi-edge social networks
Brandenberger, Laurence; Casiraghi, Giona; Nanumyan, Vahan; et al. (2019)
Proceedings of the 2019 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining, ASONAM '19
In social networks, edges often form closed triangles or triads. Standard approaches to measuring triadic closure, however, fail for multi-edge networks, because they do not consider that triads can be formed by edges of different multiplicity. We propose a novel measure of triadic closure for multi-edge networks based on a shared partner statistic and demonstrate that this measure can detect meaningful closure in synthetic and empirical multi-edge networks, where conventional approaches fail. This work is a cornerstone in driving inferential network analyses from the analysis of binary networks towards the analyses of multi-edge and weighted networks, which offer a more realistic representation of social interactions and relations.
Processing Large-Scale Archival Records: The Case of the Swiss Parliamentary Records
Salamanca Miño, Luis; Brandenberger, Laurence; Gasser, Lilian; et al. (2024)
Swiss Political Science Review
Legislative bodies generally keep records of their activities. While the digitization wave spurred the availability of archival documents, their processing remains a challenge. The Swiss parliamentary records are no exception. In this paper we present a supervised pipeline for extracting and structuring of content of archival records. Our pipeline consists of five steps, starting with an assessment of which elements need extraction and how they relate to each other. Step two involves general pre-processing to prepare the PDF documents and is followed by an element classification step. Step four involves post-processing and the final step is a validation of the extracted information. With our supervised approach, we are able to process over 200,000 pages of Swiss parliamentary records (spanning the years 1891-1995), a feat that would exceed the budget of most projects using manual curation. We discuss validation of individual steps and offer guidance to researchers engaged in similar data processing efforts.
Information exchange in governance networks - Who brokers across political divides?
Angst, Mario; Brandenberger, Laurence (2022)
Governance
The exchange of information among organizations is the lifeblood of governance networks. It is a necessary condition for successful governance. Political divides between organizations often impede information exchange. We ask which organizations are most likely to broker information across political divides. We consider survey (n = 312) evidence of technical information exchange in Swiss water governance. Bayesian exponential random graph modeling results show that scientific organizations play crucial roles for cross-divide brokerage. To a lesser extent, this also holds for higher-level governmental agencies. Participation in policy forums is associated with a higher likelihood of brokering across political divides. There is however no clear benefit to participating in more than two or three forums. We conclude that an active role played by scientific organizations is the most promising avenue to increase information flow across political divides. Beyond this, we suggest setting up carefully constructed exchange forums and selectively engaging moderate members of subgroups.

Publications 1 - 10 of 12

Laurence Brandenberger

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