Empirical Modeling of Policy Diffusion in Federal States: The Dyadic Approach |
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| Authors: | Fabrizio Gilardi Katharina Füglister |
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| Institution: | 1. University of Zurich and University of Lausanne;2. 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 political economy, political delegation, methodology, and policy diffusion processes. His work has been published in several international journals, including Comparative Political Studies, the Journal of European Public Policy, the Journal of Theoretical Politics, and the Review of International Political Economy, 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).;3. Katharina Füglister is Research Assistant and PhD Candidate in political science at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. She is working on the diffusion of health care policies in Swiss cantons. Currently she is a visiting scholar at the Center for Political Studies at the University of Michigan, USA. |
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| Abstract: | Policy diffusion is a common phenomenon in federal states: indeed, one of the normative justifications of decentralized policy making is that it permits the development and spread of best practices. Following Berry and Berry (1990), event‐history analysis has been the method of choice for the quantitative investigation of policy diffusion, but Volden (2006) has recently introduced a dyadic variant of this method in which units of analysis are not states but, instead, pairs of states. This article discusses the dyadic approach with a particular focus on the diffusion of policies in Switzerland. The goal is not to introduce a new method, but rather to provide a practical overview for researchers interested in using it. The article shows how the method has migrated from the international relations literature to the policy‐diffusion literature, describes the typical structure of a dyadic dataset in a diffusion context, and discusses several modeling issues. The usefulness of the dyadic approach is illustrated empirically with the example of health‐insurance subsidy policies in Swiss cantons. |
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| Keywords: | Policy Diffusion Federalism Health Care Event‐history Analysis Dyadic Approach |
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