Diffusion Of Policy Innovations Research Articles

Innovation and Reinvention in State Policymaking: Theory and the Evolution of Living Will Laws

Most research on the diffusion of policy innovations focuses on the date of adoption and its correlates. This research examines an aspect of innovation which has received little attention: policy reinvention during the initial diffusion process and through amendment. The central proposition is that even though a set of laws or policies may be grouped into one broad, general category, states create substantively different policies through reinvention, which has important consequences for groups affected by the legislation. Hypotheses concerning the relationship between date of adoption and policy content and the effect of particular controversial policy provisions on reinventions are examined. The study has general implications for the study of the diffusion of innovations and policy in state politics.

Patterns of Adoption of Tort Law Innovations: An Application of Diffusion Theory to Judicial Doctrines

Social scientists have given increasing attention to the diffusion of policy innovations among the American states, focusing on the legislative and administrative sectors. This study is an effort to expand our understanding of policy diffusion by analyzing the diffusion of 23 innovative tort doctrines among state court systems between 1876 and 1975. This analysis examines the innovativeness of state judicial systems, the correlates of innovativeness, and the pattern of diffusion. The findings suggest that the diffusion of judicial doctrines is a very different process from the diffusion of legislation. A major reason for the difference appears to be the courts' dependence on litigants to provide opportunities for innovation.

Policy Innovativeness as a Trait of American States

1HE LITERATURE MAKING USE of quantitative data in the comparative analysis of policy outputs across the American states has largely been dependent upon public expenditure levels as indicators of policy efforts. One of the few potential altematives has been measurements of policy innovativeness, most recently reintroduced for political analysis by Jack L. Walker.' While policy innovation might be measured in a number of ways, Walker has been especially concemed with a general tendency toward innovativeness of state govemments, or as rural sociologists refer to it, adoptionproneness.2 Certainly, American political folklore is rich in suggesting that some states are innovators while others are laggards. Findings by others in later research, however, cast some doubt upon not only the adequacy of the quantitative measures devised

Comment: Problems in Research on the Diffusion of Policy Innovations

Diffusion theory has been an important tool for analysis by geographers, sociologists and economists, but the of theory among political scientists, so far, definitely does not approximate an S-shaped curve! In fact, as far as I know, Professor Gray's is only the second article in The Review that employs the word diffusion in its title.' The obstacles to the spread of theory among political scientists do not exist in the essential nature of political phenomena. The American federal system can usefully be conceived as an elaborate process, as Gray's article demonstrates, and many other cases where distinctive approaches to policy have evolved within some part of the governmental system might better be understood if seen as examples of diffusion. The reasons for political scientists' neglect of theory, of course, lie not in the peculiarities of their subject matter, but in the prevailing division of labor among scholarly disciplines in American universities. The various branches of learning stake out their special preserves and claim exclusive jurisdiction over certain variables, research problems, and explanatory theoriesdiffusion processes have been centrally important for anthropologists but have rarely been employed by students of politics. There is no good intellectual justification for restricting the use of any explanatory scheme to a limited class of social problems. All the social sciences need as much theoretical help as they can get. Certainly, Gray's article, with its references to material from several disciplines, is a model of the ecumenical spirit and a good example of the progress that can be made through judicious borrowing from other scholarly traditions. Professor Gray set out in her article to extend in a more rigorous fashion the investiga-