Policy innovation in local jurisdictions: Testing for neighborhood influence in school choice policies

Before making difficult decisions, individuals tend to collect information on decision makers in reference groups. With respect to policy innovations in a decentralized public sector, this may give rise to positive neighborhood influence on adoption decisions. In this paper, U.S. school district data are used to show that decision makers indeed are heavily affected by decision makers in reference groups. The policy innovation under consideration is inter-district public school choice. The results suggest that if a given district's neighbors' expected benefits from adopting school choice policies increase, this substantially increases the original district's probability of adoption. The paper thus supports the view that the diffusion of policy innovations is stimulated by horizontal interaction among local governments.     

Performance targets,path dependence,and policy adoption: evidence from the adoption of pollutant emission control policies in Chinese provinces

Abstract

Although performance targets imposed by high levels of governments are an important vertical result-oriented influence on local governments’ policy adoption, no studies have examined the impacts of performance targets on policy processes. Using the adoption of atmospheric pollutant emission standards by Chinese provinces in the 2000 to 2015 period, this study runs spatial autoregression models to investigate the effects of mandatory performance targets on environmental policy adoption processes in China. The results show that top-down performance targets can drive the adoption of atmospheric pollutant emission standards in Chinese provinces. Furthermore, the influence of vertical environmental performance targets on the adoption of local atmospheric pollutant emission standards is stronger in Chinese provinces that have adopted more similar standards in the previous period. The results show that top-down performance management shapes the policy adoption processes and policy adoption of Chinese provinces under vertical result-oriented performance target pressure is path-dependent.     

The Adoption of State Climate Change Policies and Renewable Portfolio Standards: Regional Diffusion or Internal Determinants?

This paper draws upon policy innovation literature and quantitatively explains the adoption of state climate change policies, leading to a broader question—what makes states more likely to adopt policies that provide a global public good? First, existing empirical evidence relating to state climate change policy adoption is reviewed. Following this brief discussion, several analytic approaches are presented that test specific hypotheses derived from the internal determinants and regional diffusion models of policy adoption. Policy diffusion is tested as a function of the motivations, resources, and obstacles of policy change. Motivations for policy innovation include environmental conditions and demands of citizens. Resources include state financial and geographic resources, such as wind and solar potential. Obstacles include a state's reliance on carbon‐intensive industries such as coal and natural gas. The results show that internal factors, particularly citizens' demands, are stronger predictors of states' policies than are diffusion effects from neighboring states.     

Bureaucratic politics,innovation compatibility,and the dynamic diffusion of subnational decentralization reforms in China

Despite the widely recognized significance of policy attributes in explaining innovation diffusion, limited research has emphasized the underlying endogenous mechanisms dictating the construction of innovation attributes. This study points out that bureaucratic politics could dynamically shape an innovation's compatibility with the potential adopters and its diffusion likelihood. Based on the subnational decentralization reforms in China, we note that compared to administrative and fiscal decentralization, political decentralization is less likely to generate personal gains and more likely to negatively affect the career prospects of local officials in a layer-by-layer personnel management system. Therefore, the study speculates that political decentralization reforms have a lower level of compatibility, consequently reducing its diffusion likelihood among local governments. We confirmed our theoretical expectations by conducting an in-depth case study of the top-down diffusion of three types of “Province-Managing-County Reforms” among 102 counties in China's Henan Province (2004–2021).     

Policy Adoption and Policy Intensity: Emergence of Climate Adaptation Planning in U.S. States

The United States is experiencing growing impacts of climate change but currently receives a limited policy response from its national leadership. Within this policy void, many state governments are stepping up and taking action on adaptation planning. Yet we know little about why some states adopt State Adaptation Plans (SAPs), while others do not. This article investigates factors that predict the emergence of SAPs, both in terms of policy adoption and policy intensity (goal ambitiousness). Applying the diffusion of innovation theory, I consider the relative influence of internal state characteristics, regional pressures, and test for conditional effects between government ideologies and severity of the problem. The results show interesting differences between predictors that influence policy adoption and ambitiousness. States are more motivated to adopt a policy when faced with greater climate vulnerability, have more liberal citizenry, and where governments have crossed policy hurdles by previously passing mitigation plans. The intensity of policies and goal setting, moreover, is more likely to be driven by interest group politics and diffuse through policy learning or sharing information among neighboring states in Environmental Protection Agency regions. These findings support an emerging scholarship that uses more complex dependent variables in policy analysis. These variables have the potential to differentiate symbolic from substantive policies and capture finer information about predictors of importance.     

Devolution and Innovation: The Adoption of State Environmental Policy Innovations by Administrative Agencies

Do states act as laboratories for reform? Are state administrative agencies likely to adopt policy innovations? This study analyzes the adoption of environmental policy innovations by state administrative agencies in the area of hazardous waste regulation. Four explanations are developed to explain the factors that affect innovation adoption: the severity of the problem, the importance of institutional factors, the role played by interest groups, and contextual factors. Institutional factors, such as state wealth and administrative professionalism, are important determinants of innovation adoption. State agencies are also likely to adopt innovations to deal with problems created by hazardous waste contamination. In addition, state environmental managers are not directly influenced by interest groups, and the inclusion of all stakeholders is likely to lead to greater support for new policy initiatives. Implications for practitioners are drawn based on the study's findings.     

Recognition of innovation and diffusion of welfare policy: Alleviating urban poverty in Chinese cities during fiscal recentralization

This article explores the complicated triangular architecture among innovation diffusion, fiscal recentralization, and authoritarian welfare regimes. We argue that local governments' adoption of innovative welfare policies attracts the attention of central authorities who tend to recognize spontaneous local innovation by releasing central administrative signals. During the era of fiscal recentralization starting from the Chinese Tax‐Sharing System Reform in 1994, cities with higher fiscal dependency are more likely to behave innovatively by adopting a new welfare policy for potential fiscal transfer rewards. The central government's recognition of this innovation stimulates cities' adoption but would reverse the effects of fiscal dependency because of the loss of the “innovativeness” of the adoption and its effectiveness in attracting the attention of superior authorities. We test our theories on the dynamic diffusion with the case of China's Urban Minimum Living Standard Assistance system, an urban poverty‐alleviation policy implemented fully in 1999.     

Policy on innovation in Australia: Divergence in definitions,problems, and solutions

Innovation has joined the mainstream in many nations as governments search for new ways to tackle challenging societal and economic problems. But Australia is seen to be lagging on innovation policy. Is this related to how governments define innovation? What do they regard as the problem they are addressing? What proposed solutions follow from this? This paper examines how Australian governments have defined innovation over four decades, signalling their policy intentions about how to make the nation more innovative. Definitions of innovation are analysed using 79 Australian (national level) policy documents published from 1976 to 2019. Close reading of these documents suggests two main definitions: innovation as technology, and innovation as culture. Topic modelling uncovers more differentiated themes, shows how definitions change over time, and demonstrates an association between definitions and political parties in government. The divergent approaches suggest a lack of coherence and continuity to policy on innovation in Australia.

Points for practitioners

• Innovation has expanded and broadened in its definition and governments and policymakers have paid increasing attention to it.
• In Australia, there are two main definitions of innovation used in policy—one related to technology and one related to culture.
• The technology view of innovation can be further divided into a focus on businesses or a focus on research and development (R&D).
• Different innovation definitions, problems, and solutions dominate at different times, with Coalition governments tending to favour business and technology over culture, and Labor governments doing the opposite.
• There are divergent approaches to policy on innovation in Australia which suggest a lack of coherence and consistency in policy over the long term.

     

Bottom-Up Federalism: The Diffusion of Antismoking Policies from U.S. Cities to States

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). This study conducts the first comprehensive analysis of vertical policy diffusion from city governments to state governments, while simultaneously examining the influence of state-to-state and national-to-state diffusion. Focusing on three different types of antismoking laws, we find evidence that policies do bubble up from city governments to state governments. State politics are crucial to this relationship, however, as local-to-state diffusion is contingent on the level of legislative professionalism and the strength of health advocates in the state.     

中央-地方互动与“十一五”节能目标责任考核政策的制定过程分析

节能目标责任考核政策是我国"十一五"期间用以保障实现单位国内生产总值能源消耗降低20%这一约束性指标的重要政策,本文从中央-地方互动视角研究该政策的制定过程。研究发现,节能目标责任考核政策的制定过程呈现出"中央政府提出方针——地方政府进行创新性政策实践——中央政府肯定创新并颁布新政策——地方政府进行政策复制"的中央-地方互动特征,具有地方政策创新和自上而下政策复制相结合的特点。源自省级政府的政策实践是我国节能目标责任考核政策建立的主要学习源,为中央政府的政策出台提供了参照与经验,加速了中国节能考核政策的发展。但这些作为政策备选项的地方实践,总体上比较单一,并在中央节能目标责任考核政策出台后迅速进行了复制式修订。此外,节能目标责任考核政策的地方创新性实践主要发生在省级政府层面,地市级政府和更低层次的政府更多起到的是政策执行的作用。本文从动力机制的角度对此现象进行了初步解释。     

Domestic political determinants of inflation

Abstract. Political economists have advanced a variety of diverse and competing hypotheses to explain the domestic political dimension of inflation. With few exceptions, however, these hypotheses have been tested individually without regard to competing explanations. This study uses pooled time-series data on fifteen industrial democracies to examine five prominent political hypotheses that purport to explain either political pressures that cause inflation or institutional arrangements that insulate governments from these pressures. The results indicate that: (1) Central Bank independence provides an effective counterweight to inflation by insulating monetary policy making from inflationary (particularly, partisan) impulses; (2) Government spending increases caused by distributive and redistributive politics intensify inflationary pressures even in countries with independent Central Banks and neocorporatist arrangements; (3) Inflation is determined partially by the ideology of the party controlling government. Leftist governments in pursuit of income redistribution produce higher inflation than conservative governments; (4) Elections do not have significant effects on inflation under any structural circumstances; and (5) Neocorporatism does not consistently reduce inflation or contain the inflationary effects of partisan manipulation and fiscal expansion. However, neocorporatism may stop inflation if wage moderation by labour is accompanied by the government's commitment to pursue restrictive monetary policy.     

Sharing the Rewards,Dividing the Costs? The Electoral Consequences of Social Pacts and Legislative Reform in Western Europe

Do electoral pressures provide an explanation for why governments offer pacts to unions and employers rather than acting through legislation when faced with the need to pass potentially unpopular reforms to welfare policies, wages, and labour markets? This article addresses that question by analysing whether governments’ pursuit of pacts affects their vote share and increases the probability that they gain re-election for 16 West European countries between 1980 and 2012. It is found that the presence of social pacts has a significant and positive effect on incumbents’ vote shares at the next election and also results in a higher probability of re-election. These results are conditioned by government type: While all types of governments benefit electorally from pacts, the electoral penalties from the pursuit of unilateral legislation on policy reforms harm single-party majorities the most, minority governments moderately, and coalition majorities the least.     

Determinants of Pro‐Fracking Measure Adoption by New York Southern Tier Municipalities

New York municipalities passed more than 60 measures promoting high‐volume hydraulic fracturing (HVHF), 2008–12. These policies and resolutions signaled to state officials that municipalities desired HVHF's promised economic benefits and were anxious for an end to the state's HVHF moratorium. They also may be evidence of municipalities proactively preparing for a drilling boom. Why did some jurisdictions adopt these measures while others did not? While scholarship suggests that policy adoption is facilitated when jurisdictions and citizens possess more resources, capacity appears to have a negative or negligible impact on pro‐HVHF action. Such action appears more likely when local actors anticipate HVHF's potential gains but have not previously experienced substantial drilling, perceive that the industry could be viable locally, and can access relevant policy examples. Some lessons from conventional adoption scholarship may not apply when policies are symbolic, advocacy may be elite‐driven, and mimicry is an important diffusion mechanism.     

The Impact of Management Capacity on Government Innovation in Korea: An Empirical Study

ABSTRACT

A common assertion within public management is that management capacity drives policy outcomes. This study tests that argument, focusing on an important policy outcome—innovation. Data were drawn from the Korean government to examine the impact of government's management capacity for the adoption and implementation of innovation. The results confirm that both managerial behaviors and structures are drivers of government innovation. The adoption and implementation of innovative projects require full-scale management capacity, encompassing innovative leadership, a quality workforce, appropriate structures/systems, and the ability to manage external influences. These results suggest that public management capacity drives innovation in government by changing managerial behaviors and structures. Implications of these results for managing government innovation are discussed.     

Actively Cultivating Policy Similarity. A Regional Strategy in Education Policy in France and Germany

Regionalization processes across Western Europe have triggered analyses of regional policy divergence. Yet, in a number of cases, regional governments appear to have deliberately strived to achieve policy conformity. Previous research tends to emphasize exogenous explanations of regional policy convergence. In contrast, this paper addresses the issue of regional policy convergence by focusing on endogenous explanatory factors. Its objective is to carry out an investigation of when, how, and with what effect a ‘desire for conformity’ arises, and contends that regional governments may actively cultivate policy similarity as a strategy to develop or secure their policy capacity. Specifically, the paper argues that the adoption of this strategy is contingent upon two requirements that may or may not be met, and that its outcome is the convergence on targeted dimensions of regional policies. The two requirements are: (i) a countrywide public preference for policy uniformity in the policy area of concern, and (ii) the presence of a threat posed to regional policy capacity by various political entrepreneurs, including the central state, who blame regions for providing divergent policies on particular dimensions. This paper is based on the comparison of two case studies where regional governments deliberately pursued policy conformity on targeted dimensions of their education policy: school-building policy in France and curricula policy in Germany. The two case studies also present dissimilar features that make it possible to investigate the effects of institutional setting and policy distribution on the adoption and operation of the active-cultivation-of-policy-similarity strategy.     

Portable Innovation,Policy Wormholes,and Innovation Diffusion

This article explores the effects of city managers' career paths on the diffusion of climate policy innovation among municipal governments in the United States. Using the agent network diffusion (AND) model, the authors hypothesize that local climate policy innovations are portable and that cities may learn from distant jurisdictions to which they are connected through the career paths of managers, a phenomenon termed the “policy wormhole” effect. Employing a dyadic panel data set of more than 400 Florida cities from 2005 to 2010, these hypotheses are tested using dyadic event history analysis. The results support both the portable innovation hypothesis and the policy wormhole hypothesis. Cities can facilitate the diffusion of policy innovations by paying special attention to the recruitment process of city managers.     

Adopt or Not and Innovation Variation: A Dynamic Comparison Study of Policy Innovation and Diffusion Mechanisms

Abstract

Policy innovation and diffusion literature mainly focuses on the decision to adopt a new policy, while ignoring the differences among new policies. This study divides the decision-making process of policy innovation diffusion into two phases: in the “innovate or not” phase, governments make the decision to adopt or reject the new policy, while “how to innovate” is the process by which governments formulate specific content for the new policy. A dynamic comparative analysis finds that effects of internal determinants and diffusion mechanisms vary during these two phases and that internal determinants moderate the effects of diffusion mechanisms.     

The Diffusion of Human Trafficking Policies in the Post-Soviet Region: A Comparative Analysis of Policy Adoption in Ukraine,Latvia, and Russia

This paper analyzes how human trafficking policies diffused in the post-Soviet region. By adapting the diffusion of innovation framework to fit the international context, I examine whether human trafficking adoptions in the post-Soviet region were due to internal determinants and/or diffusion effects. A comparison of Russia, Latvia, and Ukraine found that internal determinants such as state commitment to human trafficking policy and interest group strength were more important to policy adoption than external pressures from the international community while state capacity and bureaucratic restructuring impeded policy adoption. I argue that policymaking, even in authoritarian regimes, is more nuanced than blind compliance with international treaties and shows that interest groups and policy entrepreneurs work within the constraints of national policymaking to adopt human trafficking policies.     

Clarity of responsibility and foreign policy performance voting

Do voters’ assessments of the government's foreign policy performance influence their vote intentions? Does the ‘clarity of responsibility’ in government moderate this relationship? Existing research on the United States demonstrates that the electorate's foreign policy evaluations influence voting behaviour. Whether a similar relationship exists across the advanced democracies in Europe remains understudied, as does the role of domestic political institutions that might generate responsibility diffusion and dampen the effect of foreign policy evaluations on vote choice. Using the attitudinal measures of performance from the 2011 Transatlantic Trends survey collected across 13 European countries, these questions are answered in this study through testing on incumbent vote the diffusion‐inducing effects of five key domestic factors frequently used in the foreign policy analysis literature. Multilevel regression analyses conclude that the electorate's ability to assign punishment decreases at higher levels of responsibility diffusion, allowing policy makers to circumvent the electoral costs of unpopular foreign policy. Specifically, coalition governments, semi‐presidential systems, ideological dispersion among the governing parties and the diverse allocation of the prime ministerial and foreign policy portfolios generate diffusion, dampening the negative effects of foreign policy disapproval on vote choice. This article contributes not only to the debate on the role of foreign policy in electoral politics, but also illustrates the consequential effects of domestic institutions on this relationship.