Policy Diffusion Studies Research Articles

Modeling State Firearm Law Adoption Using Temporal Network Models.

US states are largely responsible for the regulation of firearms within their borders. Each state has developed a different legal environment with regard to firearms based on different values and beliefs of citizens, legislators, governors, and other stakeholders. Predicting the types of firearm laws that states may adopt is therefore challenging. We propose a parsimonious model for this complex process and provide credible predictions of state firearm laws by estimating the likelihood they will be passed in the future. We employ a temporal exponential-family random graph model to capture the bipartite state law-state network data over time, allowing for complex interdependencies and their temporal evolution. Using data on all state firearm laws over the period 1979-2020, we estimate these models' parameters while controlling for factors associated with firearm law adoption, including internal and external state characteristics. Predictions of future firearm law passage are then calculated based on a number of scenarios to assess the effects of a given type of firearm law being passed in the future by a given state. Results show that a set of internal state factors are important predictors of firearm law adoption, but the actions of neighboring states may be just as important. Analysis of scenarios provide insights into the mechanics of how adoption of laws by specific states (or groups of states) may perturb the rest of the network structure and alter the likelihood that new laws would become more (or less) likely to continue to diffuse to other states. The methods used here outperform standard approaches for policy diffusion studies and afford predictions that are superior to those of an ensemble of machine learning tools. The proposed framework could have applications for the study of policy diffusion in other domains.

Measuring Policy Diffusion in Federal Systems: The Case of Legalizing Cannabis in Canada under Time Constraints

Abstract Existing studies of policy diffusion rely on quantitative or qualitative methods depending on the number of cases and the policy at hand. Studies of diffusion in Canada, for instance, almost exclusively use qualitative techniques due to the limited number of subnational units. In this article, we explore whether machine learning techniques can complement qualitative approaches in these contexts. In 2015, the Canadian federal government decided to impose the legalization of cannabis and gave the provinces and territories a short time frame to develop and implement legislation. Previous qualitative research on this case found that within-province policy development was more salient than interprovincial diffusion. Using a plagiarism detection software, we find limited evidence of exact matches between provincial legislation, but a cosine score approach reveals significant similarities across provinces. These results suggest that computational and qualitative techniques together should be used where possible to identify and analyze policy diffusion in certain contexts.

Crossing the boundaries: reimagining innovation and diffusion

Boundaries represent separation and the end of one thing and the beginning of another. The diffusion of innovations represents a transmission of information, personal relationships, creativity and similarities across boundaries. While policy and management innovation and diffusion studies began as an American state policy field, over the last 20 years the studies have expanded to include new frameworks for Chinese, Korean and other countries’ innovation and diffusion studies. Using an expanded range of institutional structures, leadership, and factors that impact innovation and diffusion, these studies embrace more comparative studies of policy diffusion across countries. In this paper, we lay out key topics in organizational and policy innovation studies, and independent variables found to lead to innovation and diffusion. In addition, we argue we should expand the types of variables included in multivariate models to empirically test questions related to which innovations diffuse rapidly or incompletely, why governments adopt innovations, and what barriers and resources are present across types of innovations. We introduce three types of boundaries—space boundaries, time and path dependency boundaries, and actors boundaries that we believe should be more regularly and broadly included in innovation and diffusion studies, and we conclude by defining how these boundaries can be operationalized.

Theorizing policy diffusion: from a patchy set of mechanisms to a paradigmatic typology

ABSTRACT In recent decades, we have witnessed the diffusion of policy diffusion studies across many sub-disciplines of political science. Four mechanisms of policy diffusion—learning, competition, emulation and coercion—have become widely accepted as explanations for how policymaking processes and policy outcomes in one polity influence those in other polities. After pointing to major shortcomings of this inductively gained set of mechanisms, we present a theoretically more coherent typology that draws on key concepts from International Relations and Policy Studies. The four mechanisms we lay down consider rationalist and social constructivist approaches equally and they incorporate symmetric and asymmetric constellations. By further distinguishing between processes confined to one policy field and those arising from links across policy fields, we present a typology of eight theoretically consistent pathways of policy diffusion. Our framework enables the aggregation of knowledge and contributes to conceptual coherence in multi-methods research.

Growth and gaps: a meta-review of policy diffusion studies in the American states

Research on how policies diffuse throughout the American federal system is robust and vast, but there has yet to be a systematic accounting for its results. Using a systematic review and meta-analysis, this study presents the most comprehensive analysis to date of how policy innovation flows state-to-state and the average effects of commonly used variables in the study of policy diffusion (for example, neighbour adoptions, ideological distance between states and legislative professionalism). Additionally, heterogeneity in these effects is examined across regulatory, morality and governance policy types. The study not only estimates these weighted-average effects, but it also illuminates important biases in policy diffusion research. The article concludes by making recommendations for addressing those biases and increasing international collaboration on policy innovation research and results synthesis.

Direct democracy, policy diffusion, and medicalized marijuana

AbstractVirtually all studies of policy diffusion are based on statutory enactments by state legislatures. But a substantial number of medicalized marijuana laws were initiated through citizen initiatives and ratified by referenda (I&R). This case study suggests that the diffusion of laws adopted by I&R requires two modifications to the conventional model of policy diffusion. First, early policy adoptions must occur through direct democracy so that horizontal diffusion results when those past adoptions by the I&R process lead to future adoptions. Second, the necessity of bypassing institutions of representative government must be operationalized as an interaction between the availability of direct democracy and the precise political variable that blocks legislative enactments.

Disclosing Influence: Hydraulic fracturing, interest groups, and state policy processes in the United States

This paper examines copy-and-paste regulating in hydraulic fracturing (HF) fluid disclosure regulation across US states. Using text analysis, cluster analysis and document coding, we compare HF regulations of twenty-nine states and two “model bills” drafted by the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF, an environmental NGO). In contrast to recent studies that have documented ALEC’s widespread influence across policy domains, we find limited evidence of ALEC influence in HF fluid disclosure regulations. Instead, elements of the EDF bill are more prevalent across state regulations. Yet, text similarity scores between states are higher than similarity scores between states and the EDF bill. In particular, Colorado and to a lesser extent Pennsylvania functioned as leader states for other states to follow. This indicates that state-to-state communication was a more influential channel of policy diffusion than interest group model bills in this instance. Future research should better examine processes of information sharing amongst state oil and gas regulators as regulatory text is but one channel of policy diffusion. The cluster analysis also reveals that contiguous states, often within the same shale basins, frequently have different regulations. This finding calls for a reconsideration of the current state-led environmental regulatory framework for HF, which has resulted in a patchwork of regulations across the US. Finally, through the use of novel text analysis tools, this paper adds methodological diversity to the study of policy diffusion within energy policy.

Policy Diffusion: The Issue‐Definition Stage

AbstractWe put forward a new approach to studying issue definition within the context of policy diffusion. Most studies of policy diffusion—which is the process by which policymaking in one government affects policymaking in other governments—have focused on policy adoptions. We shift the focus to an important but neglected aspect of this process: the issue‐definition stage. We use topic models to estimate how policies are framed during this stage and how these frames are predicted by prior policy adoptions. Focusing on smoking restriction in U.S. states, our analysis draws upon an original data set of over 52,000 paragraphs from newspapers covering 49 states between 1996 and 2013. We find that frames regarding the policy's concrete implications are predicted by prior adoptions in other states, whereas frames regarding its normative justifications are not. Our approach and findings open the way for a new perspective to studying policy diffusion in many different areas.

A social network perspective on the interaction between policy bubbles

Studies of policy bubbles have so far ignored the possibility that a policy bubble in a given policy domain or jurisdiction may constitute an information event for another policy bubble that has been inflated elsewhere. In addition, studies of policy diffusion have paid little attention to the transmission of imperfect and wrongful policy valuations through social networks. To bridge these gaps, this article develops a theoretical framework and methodological toolbox for explaining the potential impact of interbubble dynamics on the sustainment of policy bubbles. This is achieved by focusing on: (i) the diffusion of interbubble connectivity information through social networks characterized by varying levels of segregation; (ii) the perceptions of distorted or corrected information by individuals at the receiving end as being factual, thus requiring no gap-filling by policy actors, or as an opinion that therefore requires gap-filling; (iii) the derived consequence in terms of simple or complex contagion; and (iv) its impact on the sustainment of policy bubbles. The main contribution of the article lies in unpacking the potential causal mechanisms through which a policy bubble can be sustained, even if positive feedback processes and contagion in the jurisdiction within which it developed no longer bolster its support bases.

Salience, Scientific Uncertainty, and the Agenda‐Setting Power of Science

Discussions of science and its relevance to public policy have recently taken center stage in political discourse, illustrating the values‐based nature of scientific policy decisions. This article uses an original data set of media coverage to examine the ways in which salience and media portrayals of scientific uncertainty affect the agenda‐setting process for scientific policy issues. We build upon two scholarly literatures by incorporating research on the use of science in the policy process into the study of policy diffusion among the American states. In doing so, we develop a framework for how media portrayals of scientific information can affect agenda setting. We test this framework on three scientific issues: Genetically modified food labeling, human papillomavirus vaccinations, and indoor tanning. Our results indicate that lawmakers introduce more legislation on salient issues, while higher reported levels of scientific uncertainty reduce the likelihood of bill introductions. This finding illustrates the potential impact of national media coverage as an information transmission mechanism and the necessity of treating policy characteristics as subject to change over time.

Who Are Your Neighbors? The Role of Ideology and Decline of Geographic Proximity in the Diffusion of Policy Innovations

States adopt policy innovations within the confines of a dynamic American federal system, but our study of policy diffusion tends to be fairly static. Single‐policy studies incorporate temporal variation, but for only one innovation. Macro‐level analyses examine broad patterns, but often by completely pooling across policy and time. This makes it difficult to identify how diffusion patterns change over time, though Walker's early work explicitly identified such temporal instability. This study specifically examines how neighbor and ideological cues change in importance over time using a dataset of 556 policies adopted from 1960 to 2014. While the findings demonstrate the generality of many key internal, external, and policy‐level determinants of adoption, there is variation in these effects across time. Most important is the relative stability of ideological similarity between adopters and declining influence of contiguous neighbors. Further, political polarization plays a role in conditioning neighbor and ideological cues.

An exploration of the diffusion of policy termination: the repeal of prevailing wage laws by US state governments

ABSTRACT Most policy diffusion studies have focused on the adoption of new policies. However, the diffusion of the repeal of old policies also occurs across organizations and governments. Thus, this study contributes to enriching the theoretical development of policy diffusion from a different angle and can thereby help us learn more about why governments repeal an established policy. Economists have provided economic justifications for why a state’s prevailing wage law should be upheld or abolished depending on their stance. However, the empirical results show that economic justification is not a persuasive reason. In other words, other, non-economic factors are more influential in the repeal of a prevailing wage law: political ideology, union power, and regional diffusion. These results are in line with arguments made in previous policy termination studies.

Editorial Note

Editorial Note

If at first you don’t succeed: the development of climate change legislation in Ireland

ABSTRACTIreland’s national climate law, the Climate Action and Low Carbon Development Act, was enacted in December 2015. It forms part of a broader trend of countries enacting overarching national framework climate change legislation, with the UK Climate Change Act of 2008 considered to be the pioneering legislation. This article seeks to answer two questions. First, to what extent did Irish policy-makers and other stakeholders draw explicitly on the example of the UK Climate Change Act in developing the Irish climate law? Second, to what extent was the development of the climate law in Ireland characterised by convergence towards the UK Climate Change Act, and how can we explain the observed level of convergence? Using a framework drawn from policy diffusion studies, the article argues that the development of Irish climate legislation can be characterised as partial policy diffusion from UK. The broad concept of overarching national climate legislation travelled from the UK, as did certain limited design features. However, domestic politics – in particular vigorous lobbying by business and farming groups – and divergent circumstances constrained the process of policy diffusion.

La difusión de políticas públicas. Estado del arte y contribuciones para la disciplina en América Latina

Policy diffusion studies look for answering why diverse countries adopt the same policy, how they do that, and who participate in that process. This article makes a revision of the main components of the framework and its strengths and weaknesses in the theoretical and methodological arena. Beside this, some research about public and social policies diffusion in Latin America are commented. That exercise allows to highlight its main contributions and challenges for continuing developing this perspective in regional cases.

The politics of policy adoption: a saga on the difficulties of enacting policy diffusion or transfer across industrialized countries

While studies of policy diffusion and policy transfer have focused largely on industrialized countries, it is the exact opposite when it comes to pension policies where the focus remains on national elements such as institutions and partisanship. Focusing on a case with a high degree of programmatic similarities, this contribution fills this gap by analyzing the adoptive process in an industrialized country. The empirical analysis involves the transfer and diffusion of the Swedish pension reform in Norway. Norway has a long history of borrowing from Sweden. Following a highly publicized Swedish pension reform embraced by the World Bank, Norwegian policy makers could have easily introduced this reform at home when they embarked into a reform process in the early 2000s. By analyzing core policy instruments of the Swedish pension reform and the agenda-setting and the formulation stages in the policy process in the Norwegian case, this contribution explains why it proves complex and difficult to attribute the outcome of a reform to a diffuser and it argues that more attention is needed on the process behind the adoption of policies from abroad.

Diffusion of innovations theory applied to global tobacco control treaty ratification

This study applies diffusion of innovations theory to understand network influences on country ratification of an international health treaty, the Framework Convention for Tobacco Control (FCTC). From 2003 to 2014 approximately 90% of United Nations member countries ratified the FCTC. We hypothesized that communication between tobacco control advocates on GLOBALink, a 7000-member online communication forum in existence from 1992 to 2012, would be associated with the timing of treaty ratification. We further hypothesized dynamic network influences such that external influence decreased over time, internal influence increased over time, and the role of opinion leader countries varied over time. In addition we develop two concepts: Susceptibility and influence that uncover the micro-level dynamics of network influence. Statistical analyses lend support to the influence of co-subscriptions on GLOBALink providing a conduit for inter-country influences on treaty ratification and some support for the dynamic hypotheses. Analyses of susceptibility and infection indicated particularly influential countries. These results have implications for the study of policy diffusion as well as dynamic models of behavior change.

Ideology, Learning, and Policy Diffusion: Experimental Evidence

We introduce experimental research design to the study of policy diffusion in order to better understand how political ideology affects policymakers’ willingness to learn from one another's experiences. Our two experiments–embedded in national surveys of U.S. municipal officials–expose local policymakers to vignettes describing the zoning and home foreclosure policies of other cities, offering opportunities to learn more. We find that: (1) policymakers who are ideologically predisposed against the described policy are relatively unwilling to learn from others, but (2) such ideological biases can be overcome with an emphasis on the policy's success or on its adoption by co‐partisans in other communities. We also find a similar partisan‐based bias among traditional ideological supporters, who are less willing to learn from those in the opposing party. The experimental approach offered here provides numerous new opportunities for scholars of policy diffusion.

Shifting Constellations of Actors and Their Influence on Policy Diffusion: A Study of the Diffusion of Drug Courts

The existing studies of policy diffusion have paid insufficient attention to how policy actors in the macroenvironment of local jurisdictions influence the process of policy diffusion, what kind of mechanisms drive the interdependent spread of a policy, and how the diffusion process changes over time. We explore, both theoretically and empirically, the role different go‐betweens can play in policy diffusion, what kind of interactions take place between the micro level and macro level, and how shifts in the constellations of actors in the macroenvironment of a local jurisdiction can influence the mechanisms and rate of policy diffusion. Our empirical study of the diffusion of drug courts in four U.S. states demonstrates that there can indeed be significant interactions between the micro level and the macro level and that these interactions are likely to shape the diffusion process.

Rapid Diffusion and Policy Reform: The Adoption and Modification of Three Strikes Laws

AbstractDespite many important recent advances in the study of policy diffusion, this research has devoted limited attention to what happens after the adoption decision. This article attempts to fill this gap in diffusion research by examining the adoption and subsequent modification of “Three Strikes and You're Out” laws in the American states. Its analysis suggests that distinct political forces affected state-level outcomes at these two stages of the policymaking process. The rapid spread of Three Strikes laws in the 1990s seems to have occurred because states with more conservative leanings and higher proportions of African-American residents gravitated to a salient and visible policy. In contrast, the modification of Three Strikes laws appears to have been encouraged by financial necessity and shifting ideological environments but hindered by the mobilization of stakeholders with an interest in preserving the status quo, including private prison operators and prison officer unions. The contrast illustrates the usefulness of treating policy diffusion as a multistage process, and the stakeholder mobilization results provide empirical support for recent theorizing about policy feedback effects.