The Communication of Ideas across Subfields in Political Science Research What factors inhibit or facilitate cross-subfield conversations in political science? This article draws on diffusion scholarship to gain insight into cross-subfield communication.
Who Heeds the Call of the Party in Congress? Research When party leaders seek support, who heeds the call and who remains unswayed? The canonical error-free spatial model of voting predicts the targeting of fence-sitting moderates.
The Diffusion of Policy Diffusion Research in Political Science Research Over the past fifty years, top political science journals have published hundreds of articles about policy diffusion. This article reports on network analyses of how the ideas and approaches in these articles have spread both within and across the subfields of American politics, comparative politics and international relations.
When Are Women More Effective Lawmakers Than Men? Research Previous scholarship has demonstrated that female lawmakers differ from their male counterparts by engaging more fully in consensus-building activities. We argue that this behavioral difference does not serve women equally well in all institutional settings.
Policy Diffusion: Seven Lessons for Scholars and Practitioners Research The scholarship on policy diffusion in political science and public administration is extensive. This article provides an introduction to that literature for scholars, students, and practitioners. It offers seven lessons derived from that litereature, build from numerous empirical studies an applied to contemporary policy debates. Based on these seven lessons, the authors offer guidance to policy makers and present opportunities for future research to students and scholars of policy diffusion.
Privatization and the Diffusion of Innovations Research The privatization of government services tends to bring about a more rapid adoption of innovative policies due to the competitive pressures of the market. In federal systems, however, the diffusion of innovations across subnational governments may offset such benefits of privatization.
Breaking Gridlock: The Determinants of Health Policy Change in Congress Research Scholars have often commented that health policymaking in Congress is mired in political gridlock, that reforms are far more likely to fail than to succeed, and the path forward is unclear. To reach such conclusions, scholars of health politics have tended to analyze individual major reform proposals to determine why they succeeded or failed and what lessons could be drawn for the future.
The Mechanisms of Policy Diffusion Research Local policy adoptions provide an excellent opportunity to test among potential mechanisms of policy diffusion. By examining three types of antismoking policy choices by the 675 largest U.S. cities between 1975 and 2000, we uncover robust patterns of policy diffusion, yielding three key findings.
A Formal Model of Learning and Policy Diffusion Research We present a model of learning and policy choice across governments. Governments choose policies with known ideological positions but initially unknown valence benefits, possibly learning about those benefits between the model’s two periods.
Bottom-Up Federalism: The Diffusion of Antismoking Policies from U.S. Cities to States Research Studies of policy diffusion often focus on the horizontal spread of enactments from one state to another, paying little or no attention to the effects of local laws on state-level adoptions. For example, scholars have not tested whether local policy adoptions make state action more likely (through a snowball effect) or less likely (through a pressure valve effect).
States as Policy Laboratories: Emulating Success in the Children’s Health Insurance Program Research This article illustrates the use of the directed dyad-year event history analysis to study policy diffusion, with an application to policy changes in the Children’s Health Insurance Program from 1998 to 2001. This analysis reveals strong evidence that states with successful policies are more likely to be emulated than are those with failing policies.
The Role of Policy Attributes in the Diffusion of Innovations Research Studies of policy diffusion have given insufficient attention to the role that characteristics of the policies themselves play in determining the speed of policy diffusion and the mechanisms through which diffusion occurs. We adopt Everett Rogers’ (1983, 2004) attribute typology from the diffusion of innovations literature and apply it to a sample of 27 policy innovations from the sphere of criminal justice policy in the U.S. states between 1973 and 2002.