How to Gauge Regulatory Copy & Paste: Measures of Textual Similarity in Italian Regional Gambling Legislation.

Policy transfer and policy diffusion have been at the centre of the debate for years. Scholars have identified numerous mechanisms of policy diffusion. However, little attention has been dedicated to Regulatory Copy & Paste (RC&P). The latter has a minor scope of implementation given the linguistic constraints and the need for a similar legal context. Nevertheless, the relevance of this practise is evident considering subnational legislation or local rulings. To move towards the motivations that drive policymakers to use this strategy, we first need to develop coherent tools to analyse this practice. Moving from the existent strategy based on plagiarism identification, this paper uses the textual similarity approach to gauge RC&P. Using Labbé's intertextual distance, we measure the presence of RC&P in the Italian regional gambling policy corpus, composed of 98 laws spanning across 20 units of analysis. The corpus allows us to test changes within the same text (up to 12 amended versions for some units) and similarities across cases. This paper provides evidence of the importance of turning rules into data, to study the effective use of RC&P as a policy strategy.