What Is New in The Study of Policy Diffusion
What Is New in The Study of Policy Diffusion
To cite this article: Covadonga Meseguer & Fabrizio Gilardi (2009) What is new in the
study of policy diffusion?, Review of International Political Economy, 16:3, 527-543, DOI:
10.1080/09692290802409236
Beth Simmons, Frank Dobbins and Geoffrey Garrett (eds) (2008) The Global
Diffusion of Markets and Democracy. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 384 pp., US$90, £45 (hardcover), ISBN 978-0-521-87889-0,
US$32.99, £16.99 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-521-70392-5
Kurt Weyland (2007) Bounded Rationality and Policy Diffusion: Social Sec-
tor Reform in Latin America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
312 pp., US$60, £35 (hardcover), ISBN 978-0-691-12974-7, US$24.95,
£14.95 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-691-13471-0
INTRODUCTION
The internationalization of policies and politics is catching the attention of
a growing number of scholars in the field of international political econ-
omy and comparative public policy (Knill, 2005; Levi-Faur and Jordana,
2005; Simmons et al., 2008; Weyland, 2007). Renewed interest in the inter-
nationalization of policies and in policy diffusion has been paralleled by
the debate on the impact of globalization on national economic policies.
Two major claims are central to this debate. First, national governments
have converged worldwide toward economic policies highly valued in an
increasingly integrated international political economy. Second, compe-
tition has caused a race to the bottom in trade barriers, capital account
regulations, tax rates, and government intervention in the economy in
general. Indeed, the degree of variance in the world with respect to capial
account openness, political regime type, and the revenues derived from
privatization of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) more than halved in the
1980s and 1990s (Simmons et al., 2008).
http://www.informaworld.com
DOI: 10.1080/09692290802409236
REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY
In view of these trends, recent work on policy diffusion claims that ex-
isting explanations of policy choices do not pay sufficient attention to the
international factors that shape those choices. Comparative political econ-
omy has been prolific in the study of domestic responses to international
events, and successful at showing how those responses vary depending on
local institutions and political and economic conditions. Yet the wave of
democratization, economic liberalization, deregulation and re-regulation,
together with the sense that policy choices have grown more alike, call into
question the specification of explanatory models that take only domestic
conditions into account. Research on the internationalization of policies
improves the specification of explanatory models to take into account the
possibility of horizontal diffusion, that is, the possibility that policy choices
in one country affect the policy choices in other countries, so causing poli-
cies to converge.
To explore this phenomenon, the general research strategy consists of
adding a diffusion component as an independent variable to test the null
hypothesis that only domestic socioeconomic and political variables ex-
plain a particular policy choice. This null hypothesis is rejected in studies
covering a wide range of policy choices: capital and current account liber-
alization, privatization, regulatory policies, trade liberalization, and social
reforms are proved to have diffused across space and, in a few cases, very
fast. Hence, it appears that previous models of policy choice were missing
an important part of the story.1
Policy diffusion is not a new topic, though. It dates back to at least
1889 (see Ross and Homer, 1976: 1–2). The fact that observations in polit-
ical research are most likely not independent is discussed in virtually all
methodology texts. Yet, in many comparative studies, the possible exis-
tence of diffusion, though briefly acknowledged, is often soon forgotten.
Early exceptions are Rogers’ (2003) seminal work on the diffusion of in-
novations and the study by Collier and Messick (1975), who explicitly
analyzed the adoption of social security programs in 59 countries as an
interdependent policy choice.2 Thus, if diffusion is not a new social phe-
nomenon, what is new in the study of policy diffusion?
We review two recent books on the diffusion of policies. The collection
edited by Simmons et al. explores the determinants of convergence in de-
mocratization and in a wide range of economic policy choices. The book
provides an overwhelming amount of new empirical material demonstrat-
ing that economic policy choices are the result of imitating the policies of
successful others, of learning from the experience of others, and of strate-
gically adapting to the policy decisions of competitors. All contributions
are quantitative analyses that explore policy decisions in a large number
of countries over extended periods.
Kurt Weyland’s volume offers an interesting complement to Simmons
et al.’s project in both substance and method. Weyland’s book focuses
528
MESEGUER AND GILARDI: THE STUDY OF POLICY DIFFUSION
Simmons et al.’s project shows that competition has been central to the
diffusion of BITs (Elkins et al., 2008) and to the diffusion of tax policies
(Swank, 2008); emulation, demonstration effects, and prevailing discourses
were behind the adoption of democracy, the protection of human rights,
and the downsizing of the public sector (Gleditsch and Ward, 2008; Lee and
Strang, 2008; Wotipka and Ramı́rez, 2008); waves of pro- and anti-capitalist
sentiments and their electoral consequences were linked to the diffusion of
financial liberalization (Quinn and Toyoda, 2008); and the concentration of
authority in change teams with shared economic views significantly drove
the diffusion of privatization (Kogut and McPherson, 2008). In general,
the book amounts to an overwhelming rejection of the null hypothesis
of independent policy choices by independent units. In other words, all
policy and institutional choices explored in the book are proved to have
been the result of a diffusion process caused by one or several diffusion
mechanisms.
The opening essay by the editors is a discussion about the mechanisms
by which policy choices in one country may influence policy choices in
others. The authors distinguish between: (1) policy convergence promoted
by dominant actors, which falls into a realist account; (2) diffusion due to
social emulation, which falls into a constructivist view; (3) diffusion result-
ing from economic competition; and (4) diffusion caused by learning from
others. Cooperative, as opposed to competitive, explanations may lead
policies to diffuse through the creation of network externalities (Milner,
2006). To be brief, coercion is the imposition of policies on national gov-
ernments by powerful international organizations or powerful countries.
Emulation is a process whereby policies spread because they are socially
valued independently of the functions they perform. It is the search for
legitimacy and status that motivates emulation. Competition is a process
whereby governments that compete for the same resources adopt the pol-
icy stance of their competitors for fear of an economic loss in case they
deviate. Finally, learning is a process whereby the experience of others
supplies relevant information on the outcomes of a given policy. Learning
comes in two versions: bounded and rational. Both types of learning imply
that the acquisition of information is costly. Yet, a bounded learner faces
extra costs in the interpretation of information and uses several heuristics
to analyze available experience. In so doing, bounded learners incur in
different cognitive biases, such as over-representing the success of a close
policy experiment (Meseguer, 2005; Weyland, 2007).4
One important theoretical point with major empirical consequences is
that there is a strong degree of overlap among the different mechanisms of
policy diffusion considered in the literature. One version of the learning
channel – that of bounded learning – overlaps with the social emulation
approach: bounded learners are attracted to the experiences of prestigious
530
MESEGUER AND GILARDI: THE STUDY OF POLICY DIFFUSION
531
REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY
534
MESEGUER AND GILARDI: THE STUDY OF POLICY DIFFUSION
535
REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY
CONCLUSIONS
Recent research on the internationalization of policies has explored why
countries rapidly adopted liberal politics and market policies. The novel
hypothesis tested is that convergence in choices might have been neither
the outcome of an independent discovery of best practice nor the outcome
of unilateral imposition. Rather, the hypothesis entertained in these works
is that policies spread horizontally, that is, that policy choices in one coun-
try influenced policy choices in other countries, resulting in the adoption
of the same policy. How and why would this happen?
A government may adopt the same policy stance as a competitor to
prevent the loss from not following suit. Alternatively, the logic of conver-
gence may be cooperative in the sense that mutual benefits may result from
shared policies. Also, a government confronted with uncertainty about
what to do may learn from the policy choices of others or may simply
imitate what peers perceived as successful do, without further reasoning
537
REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY
about the causes of success. In any case, demonstration effects are likely
to be not only about economic results but also about political outcomes.
From a substantive point of view, there is little innovation in the inter-
nationalization research agenda: especially in the sociological literature,
diffusion has been well explored. At the theoretical level, the mechanisms
put forward to explain the channels through which policies may diffuse
are well known to the discipline, and some of them are misplaced in the
discussion. Moreover, although it is acknowledged that there is a high
degree of overlap among mechanisms little emphasis is given to feedback
among them and to the interaction between diffusion mechanisms and
domestic conditions.
From an empirical point of view, there are some methodological in-
novations and an impressive amount of new data and results. Without
underestimating the value of having new empirical evidence about old
mechanisms, we think there is room for potential improvements in the
empirical tests. First, contributions have focused on policies that diffused
rapidly, even though a second look revealed that, for some of them, dif-
fusion needed to be qualified. Second, most empirical tests have been
confined in time to the latest wave of marketization and democratization,
overlooking for the most part the fact that periods of diffusion existed
before. Hence, one is left with the question as to whether the mechanisms
and results obtained would be applicable to other ‘diffusions’. Third, more
effort should be devoted to integrating heterogeneity into our models.
On the positive side, however, the results of the empirical tests are an in-
vitation to think about some issues: for instance, why some policies spread
faster than others or why policies cluster rather than converge globally. It
is surprising to find that countries influence each other even when policies
do not converge and that clusters of policies may appear conditional on
some factor – geographic proximity, competition, institutional affiliations,
shared ideologies etc. Expanding the empirical research to new policy do-
mains and/or regions that seem resistant to the latest wave of liberalization
may throw some light respectively on the factors that cause policy clusters
and on the robustness of the results found so far.
We also think that the literature on diffusion should make a crucial move
from invoking mechanisms broadly related to schools of thought in inter-
national relations or public policy to state much more refined and unified
hypotheses about what type of mechanisms are expected to be relevant
and when. Letting the data speak has been useful to unfold quite unex-
pected patterns; but this strategy may not be the best way to proceed from
this point on. Without being exhaustive, we propose that further research
should establish theoretically informed hypotheses on issues such as: (1)
why some policies diffuse faster than others; (2) why regional patterns
of policy diffusion vary so much; (3) why partisan politics retains pre-
dictive power to explain some policy adoptions but not others; (4) what
538
MESEGUER AND GILARDI: THE STUDY OF POLICY DIFFUSION
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Previous drafts of this article were discussed at seminars and workshops
at the University Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona; the University of Hamburg;
CIDE, Mexico City; and the 2005 Annual Convention of the International
Studies Association (ISA). We thank participants in these forums, and
especially, Gabriel Negretto and RIPE editor Leonard Seabrooke, for excel-
lent suggestions. Fabrizio Gilardi would like to thank the Swiss National
Science Foundation for financial support (grants no. 100012-105763/1 and
PA001-115307/1).
NOTES
1 Studies on the diffusion of political institutions are still rare. See Gleditsch and
Ward (2008) on the diffusion of democracy, and Wotipka and Ramirez (2008)
on the diffusion of international treaties.
2 A well-established literature concentrates on the diffusion of policies in the US
states (for example, see Berry and Berry (1990, 1999), Berry et al. (2003), Mintrom
(1997), Mintrom and Vergari (1998), Shipan and Volden (2006), Volden (2002,
2006)).
3 Event history analysis (EHA) has been the standard (although not unique) tool
to obtain estimates of the probability of adopting a particular policy (Berry and
539
REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY
Berry, 1990, 1999; Strang and Tuma, 1993; Strang and Soule, 1998; Hedström,
1994; Hedström et al., 2000). More and more frequently, a spatial dimension
is added, which takes diffusion mechanisms into account through variously
specified ‘spatial lags’ (see, for instance, Simmons and Elkins (2004), Elkins et
al. (2008) and Swank (2008)). This is an appropriate approach for modeling rel-
atively simple spatial dependencies, which can also account for more complex
network dependencies (see, for example, Polillo and Guillén (2005)).
4 Note that in the constructivist literature, there is an added problem to infor-
mation acquisition, which is information interpretation or not knowing how
to know (Blyth, 1997). The distinction between mechanisms of diffusion is not
only relevant for analytical purposes. As some authors argue, the fact that
policies diffuse because a specific mechanism of diffusion operates may have
important welfare consequences. For instance, Weyland (2007) argues that dif-
fusion that is based on simple emulation is likely to result in the adoption of
models that are not adequately adapted to the special conditions existing in
one country. Thus, blind copying of international policy models may result in
suboptimal outcomes at home.
5 In the sociological jargon, this is called coercive isomorphism.
6 Arguably, the mechanisms should not all be placed horizontally. Whereas
competition seems to be confined to issue areas, the sociological perspective
deals with more systemic issues of the sort of world views, world values and
the like.
7 To be sure, our own work on diffusion does not escape these criticisms.
8 For alternative but substantially similar classifications of mechanisms of diffu-
sion, see Gilardi (2005) and Weyland (2007). The distinction between mecha-
nisms that alter ‘incentives’ and those that alter ‘information’ can be found in
Simmons and Elkins (2004).
9 Ideally, scholars should consider recent advances in the quantitative analysis of
causal complexity such as the Boolean probit and logit techniques developed
by Braumoeller (2003), which allow the statistical investigation of multiple
causal paths.
10 A similar concern was raised a few years ago by Strang and Soule (1998).
11 Nonetheless, the authors acknowledge important variation in choices. For in-
stance, some developing states with small public sectors like Greece and Por-
tugal, and others like Norway and Austria with already large public sectors,
increased public employment (p. 3).
12 It is has been quite frequent to model learning only from success (Simmons
and Elkins, 2004). Yet, it seems obvious that policy-making is usually a choice
among alternative policies and that policymakers learn both from failure and
from success.
13 An important finding of this chapter is that the capital account policies of
leading economies in no way compelled emerging markets to liberalize.
14 This point that poor polities imitate more than learn is also raised, for instance,
in Sharman’s (2006) work on tax havens.
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Covadonga Meseguer is a member of the Juan March Institute for Advanced Study
in the Social Sciences (Madrid, Spain). She has held research positions at New
York University, the European University Institute, the Helen Kellogg Institute
for International Studies, University Pompeu Fabra, and UT Austin. Her work
has appeared in Journal of Public Policy, Rationality and Society, European Journal of
Political Economy, Annals of the American Academy of Social and Political Sciences, and
540
MESEGUER AND GILARDI: THE STUDY OF POLICY DIFFUSION
others.Her book manuscript Learning, Policy Making and Market Reforms is due to be
published by Cambridge University Press in 2009. She is currently researcher at the
Center for Research and Teaching in Economics (CIDE), Mexico City, and affiliated
faculty of the Barcelona Institute for International Studies (IBEI), Barcelona.
Fabrizio Gilardi is Associate Professor of public policy at the Institute of Political
Science and at the Center for Comparative and International Studies, University
of Zurich, Switzerland. His research interests include regulation, comparative po-
litical economy, political delegation, methodology, and policy diffusion. His work
has been published in several international journals, including Comparative Po-
litical Studies, Journal of European Public Policy, and Journal of Theoretical Politics,
among others. He is also the author of a book on independent regulatory agencies
in Europe (Edward Elgar, 2008), and the co-editor of a volume on delegation in
contemporary democracies (Routledge, 2006).
REFERENCES
Berry, F. and Berry, W. D. (1990) ‘State Lottery Adoptions as Policy Innovations:
An Event History Analysis’, American Political Science Review, 84(2): 395–415.
Berry, F. and Berry, W. D. (1999) ‘Innovation and Diffusion Models in Policy Re-
search’, in P. A. Sabatier (ed.) Theories of the Policy Process, Boulder, CO: West-
view Press, pp. 169–200.
Berry, W. D., Fording, R. C. and Hanson, R. L. (2003) ‘Reassessing the “Race to the
Bottom” in State Welfare Policy’, Journal of Politics, 65(2): 327–49.
Blyth, M. (1997) ‘Any More Bright Ideas? The Ideational Turn of Comparative
Political Economy’, Comparative Politics, 29(2): 229–50.
Braumoeller, B. F. (2003) ‘Causal Complexity and the Study of Politics’, Political
Analysis, 11(3): 209–33.
Braun, D. and Gilardi, F. (2006) ‘Taking Galton’s Problem Seriously. Towards a
Theory of Policy Diffusion’, Journal of Theoretical Politics, 18(3): 298–322.
Collier, D. and Messick, R. (1975) ‘Prerequisites Versus Diffusion: Testing Alterna-
tive Explanations of Social Security Adoption’, The American Political Science
Review, 69(4): 1299–315.
Elkins, Z., Guzman, A. and Simmons, B. (2008) ‘Competing for Capital: The Dif-
fusion of Bilateral Investment Treaties, 1960–2000’, in B. Simmons, F. Dobbins
and G. Garrett (eds) The Global Diffusion of Markets and Democracy, New York:
Cambridge University Press, pp. 220–60.
Finnemore, M. (1996) National Interests in International Society, Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press.
Gilardi, F. (2005) ‘The Institutional Foundations of Regulatory Capitalism. The
Diffusion of Independent Regulatory Agencies in Western Europe’, Annals of
the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 598: 84–101.
Gleditsch, K. and Ward, M. D. (2008) ‘Diffusion and the International Context of
Democratization’, in B. Simmons, F. Dobbins and G. Garrett (eds) The Global
Diffusion of Markets and Democracy, New York: Cambridge University Press, pp.
261–302.
Guisinger, A. (2005) ‘Understanding Cross Country Patterns in Trade Liberaliza-
tion’, doctoral dissertation, Yale University.
Hedström, P. (1994) ‘Contagious Collectivities: On the Spatial Diffusion of Swedish
Trade Unions, 1890–1940’, American Journal of Sociology, 99(5): 1157–79.
Hedström, P., Sandell, R. and Stern, C. (2000) ‘Mesolevel Networks and the Diffu-
sion of Social Movements: The Case of the Swedish Social Democratic Party’,
American Journal of Sociology, 106(1): 145–72.
541
REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY
542
MESEGUER AND GILARDI: THE STUDY OF POLICY DIFFUSION
F. Dobbins and G. Garrett (eds) The Global Diffusion of Markets and Democracy,
New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 64–103.
Volden, C. (2002) ‘The Politics of Competitive Federalism: A Race to the Bottom in
Welfare Benefits?’, American Journal of Political Science, 46(2): 352–63.
Volden, C. (2006) ‘States as Policy Laboratories: Emulating Success in the Children’s
Health Insurance Program’, American Journal of Political Science, 50(2): 294–312.
Weyland, K. (ed.) (2007) Bounded Rationality and Policy Diffusion: Social Sector Reform
in Latin America, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Wotipka, C. and Ramı́rez, F. (2008) ‘World Society and Human Rights: An Event
History Analysis of the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrim-
ination. Against Women’, in B. Simmons, F. Dobbins and G. Garrett (eds) The
Global Diffusion of Markets and Democracy, New York: Cambridge University
Press, pp. 303–43.
543