No abstract

Quantitative-oriented diffusion studies, either focused on diffusion patterns or mechanisms, take for granted that policy adoptions are manifest and therefore directly observable in the legislation. A more nuanced perspective of policy adoption taking into account gradual differences between adoption and non-adoption is proposed with this paper, valid for diffusion among communities and states in federal settings and among countries on the global level. Besides the aspect of visibility, intentions are also important when measures are adopted. While some measures are transferred with a clear instrumental aim, others are rather transferred for symbolical reasons. Looking at specific processes, the paper proposes a concept that disentangles the current understanding of policy diffusion and provides empirical evidence that current diffusion research misconceives instances. The four different transfer types are illustrated with empirical evidence from sub-national energy policy-making in Switzerland. The systematic investigation of the cases allows to finding explanations for the different transfer types.Keywords Policy diffusion Á Transfer Á Binarity Á Visibility Á Facticity That countries as well as sub-national units develop policy measures not totally independent from each other was underestimated in the analysis of policy-making for a long time. The diffusion of public policies was studied in the late 1960s and beyond by Walker (1969) and Gray (1973) and explored in the setting of the United States (US). The groundwork was laid by Rogers (2003) with his seminal work on the diffusion of innovations in different areas that was published in the first edition in 1962. Since then, policy diffusion has increasingly gained attention on several levels in various fields of policy analysis. Scholars have accumulated evidence of different diffusion channels, while recently, the study of the mechanisms behind such processes dominated the research agenda (Berry and Berry 2007). These state-of-the art studies proclaim that an adoption of a measure is based, for example, on a learning process or on competitive conditions.

Many scholars have convincingly shown that policies diffuse between national and sub-national entities for several different reasons. Although diffusion processes are empirically proven, we witness two shortcomings in the discussion: First, there is a lack of comparative research across policy areas. Second, the question of why diffusion might not occur in a certain domain is under-theorized and lacks an empirical test. By comparing the rationale behind diffusion processes in two policy domains-energy policy and locational policy-this paper shows that two aspects matter for diffusion processes: First is the observability of policy measures, that is, how easily things can be observed by others; second is the competitiveness of the policy domain. If policy measures can be hidden easily and the policy domain is highly competitive, policy diffusion is very unlikely to happen. Therefore, we seek the integration of these two aspects in prospective diffusion research.

No abstract

No abstract