Diffusion of Complex Governance Arrangements: State Approaches to Addressing Intimate Partner Violence

Abstract

In the 1970s, many viewed domestic violence as a private concern. Since then, every state has adopted a domestic violence coalition to address intimate partner violence (IPV) through government intervention. States vary, however, in the structure of the coalitions, participation in federal programs, and the comprehensiveness of IPV services offered. Using the theoretical lenses of policy diffusion and policy drift, this study assesses the development of IPV coalitions from 1976 to 2018, paying particular attention to institutional structures, intergovernmental resources, and strategic service priorities. We find evidence of policy drift and multidirectional policy diffusion in state IPV institutional structures, service delivery, federal program participation, and strategic priorities of these activities. Federal grant programs increase the likelihood of program emulation among states and may encourage innovation within existing institutional and policy structures for the development of comprehensive services and a preventive approach to IPV that best serve vulnerable groups.

Administrative Decentralization and the Role of Information: The Case of Intimate Partner Violence During the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…Public administration scholars have analyzed IPV through diverse theoretical lenses including representative bureaucracy (Andrews & Johnston Miller, 2013), policy implementation (Javakhishvili & Jibladze, 2018; Johnson et al, 2020; Wiley, 2022), policy diffusion and drift in decentralized contexts (Fay & Polischuk, 2022), complex adaptive systems (Gear et al, 2020), and critical media studies (Mahapatro & Prasad, 2022). This collective body of work recognizes that although IPV is a gendered issue, it is ultimately rooted in and mediated through cultural, social, and economic factors, necessitating multifactorial policy responses at behavioral, community, organizational, and structural levels.…”

Explaining transgender policy change: Policy momentum in Canada and Australia

“…It builds upon the directional components of policy diffusion and creates jurisdictional flexibility by integrating scholarship on MLG (Marks & Hooghe, 2004; Simmons et al., 2006). Rather than focusing exclusively on top‐down or bottom‐up diffusion, which is the dominant approach in the literature (Fay & Polischuk, 2021), policy momentum theorizes how vertical and horizontal diffusion processes can happen at the same time and work together. The multidirectional processes occur through the existing mechanisms of policy diffusion: coercion, competition, learning, and emulation (Simmons et al., 2006).…”

“…Attempts to answer similar questions tend to focus on processes of domestic or international policy/norm diffusion (Ayoub, 2015; Fernández & Lutter, 2013; Kollman, 2009) rather than considering the full range of influential factors that may exist at other levels of analysis. These rich literatures provide powerful theoretical accounts that focus analytical attention on different units of analysis, but they overlook “the complex governance environment in which solutions are implemented and the multidirectional pressure governments face to adopt similar policies” (Fay & Polischuk, 2021, p. 1). By failing to account for the multidirectional complexity inherent in at least some instances of policy diffusion and policy change, existing studies provide only partial explanations of the global and domestic factors that influence transgender policy change cross‐nationally.…”

Reckoning With Race and Gender in Public Administration and Public Policy: A Substantive Social Equity Turn

“…And the final contribution we introduce addresses an issue that heavily impacts women: intimate partner violence (IPV). Daniel L. Fay and Luciana Polischuk (2022) examine change over time in the evolution of US state governments' and nonprofits' efforts to serve survivors of IPV. States vary in the structure of the coalitions they have developed to address IPV, their participation in federal programs, and the comprehensiveness of IPV services offered.…”