Similarity and Diversity in Policymaking

Abstract

Transatlantic Policymaking in an Age of Austerity: Diversity and Drift. Edited by Martin A. Levin, Martin Shapiro. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2004. 344 pp., $29.95 (ISBN: 1-589-01031-0). In the literature on public policymaking, interest in explicit cross-Atlantic comparisons has been a casualty of the somewhat artificial distinction between comparative and American politics. The prevalent image has emphasized a one-way diffusion of US ideas and practices to European countries, with different degrees of absorption by the latter. Transatlantic Policymaking in an Age of Austerity tries to offer a more nuanced and complex picture of what is, in reality, a two-way street between Europe and the United States—with several turns, stops, and drifts along the way. In Transatlantic Policymaking in an Age of Austerity Martin Levin, Martin Shapiro, and their contributors explicitly compare a wide set of domestic policymaking areas in different European and North American nations. The major goal of the book is to explain how different national institutional structures on both sides of the Atlantic cope with common exogenous challenges. The book develops a story of persisting transatlantic divergences behind a facade of common challenges and apparent convergences in policy solutions. Politics, on both sides of the Atlantic, is very much “reform without change, change without reform,” as Jacob Hacker, one of the contributors, characterizes it. But, behind this general, albeit superficial, pattern, the book emphasizes the variety of divergent paths, resulting from domestic political dynamics whose rhythm is imparted by the various specific national institutions and political structures. Looking at different countries, the various chapters examine, at different levels of theoretical articulation, how national policymaking confronts common challenges in ways that are largely shaped by context-specific and path-dependent processes. The result is a quite diversified picture of policies across countries. In some areas, progressive convergence has occurred between European and US experiences. In other areas, divergence persists. In still others, a disjointed pattern in the way the policies evolve prevails. Transatlantic Policymaking in an Age of …