Abstract
Global convergence of public policies has been regarded as a defining feature of the late twentieth century. This study explores the generalizability of this thesis for three road safety measures: (i) road safety agencies; (ii) child restraint laws; and (iii) mandatory use of daytime running lights. This study analyzes cross-national longitudinal data using survival analysis for the years 1964–2015 in 181 countries. The first main finding is that only child restraint laws have globally converged; in contrast, the other two policies exhibit a fractured global convergence process, likely as the result of competing international and national forces. This finding may reflect the lack of necessary conditions, at the regional and national levels, required to accelerate the spread of policies globally, adding further nuance to the global convergence thesis. A second finding is that mechanisms of policy adoption, such as imitation/learning and competition, rather than coercion, explain more consistently global and regional convergence outcomes in the road safety realm. This finding reinforces the idea of specific elective affinities, when explaining why the diffusion of policies may or not result in convergence. Lastly, by recognizing fractured convergence processes, these results call for revisiting the global convergence thesis and reintegrating more consistently regional analyses into policy diffusion and convergence studies.
Highlights
Political scientists, economists, international relations’ experts, and sociologists have done a great deal of research on the convergence of public policies
Economists, international relations’ experts, and sociologists have done a great deal of research on the convergence of public policies. In this growing area of research one finds analyses, which have focused on the diffusion and convergence of health policies (Iriart et al, 2001; Luke and Cotts Watkins, 2002; Gilardi et al, 2009; Wipfli et al, 2010), economic policies (Brooks, 2005; Weyland, 2005; Lee and Strang, 2006; Kogut and Macpherson, 2008, 2011), and policies such as the adoption of democratic institutions, human rights laws, and laws against terrorism (Hafner‐Burton and Tsutsui, 2005; Shor, 2008; Skrede Gleditsch and Ward, 2008; Pegram, 2010; Shor et al, 2014)
We examine the generalizability of the global policy convergence thesis and revisit an analytical framework applied to examine the mechanisms that should facilitate or delay policy convergence
Summary
Economists, international relations’ experts, and sociologists have done a great deal of research on the convergence of public policies. Wotipka and Tsutsui (2008) analyzed simultaneously seven human rights international treaties; Koo and Ramírez (2009) studied the adoption of two national human rights institutions; Frank et al (2010) examined the convergence of criminal regulation of rape, adultery, sodomy, and child sexual abuse; and Shor and colleagues (Shor et al, 2014) applied a cross-sectional analysis to examine four practices of state repression. Like these studies, we simultaneously analyze the effects of three different policies, which share the objective of decreasing traffic injuries and fatalities. The first CRL was simultaneously enacted in Belgium and Denmark in 1975, and the first mandatory DRL norm in Finland in 1972
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