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.
Coalitional Politics and Logrolling in Legislative Institutions Research We examine how a foresighted legislative chamber will design its institutions in response to ex ante incentives for universalism and ex post incentives for minimum winning coalitions and what coalitions will form as a result. To do so, we develop a model of vote trading with an endogenous voting rule and coalition formation process.
Asymmetric Effects of Intergovernmental Grants: Analysis and Implications for U.S. Welfare Policy Research Theories of federal grants to states and localities suggest that these grants have a stimulative effect on spending, causing recipient governments to expand and contract programs along with changes in the grants. However, policymakers may respond differently to grant decreases than to grant increases because they face political and bureaucratic pressures to expand programs.
Sophisticated Voting in Supermajoritarian Settings Research Empirical support for sophisticated voting in the legislative setting has been sparse. This is due to a number of factors, including the difficulty of identifying the ideal points of legislators in multidimensional spaces.