Andrew Karch

Democratic Laboratories: Policy Diffusion among the American States

The diffusion of ideas and practices is fundamental to our national way of life. In areas from technology to commerce to religion, Americans presume that good ideas will flourish. But in a country built on such presumptions, the diffusion of policy ideas is poorly understood. On issues from abortion and capital punishment to education and the environment, new policies spread from one state or locality to another. Yet, neither party operatives nor policymakers nor political scientists really understand the routes of transmission, or the rules governing them. Karchs innovative and engaging book enables us to appreciate the sources of dynamism in American politics.

Emerging Issues and Future Directions in State Policy Diffusion Research

This article analyzes existing scholarship on the diffusion of public policies among the American states, focusing on recent developments in this line of research and suggesting several potential avenues for future work. The analysis is organized around three fundamental questions. First, why does policy diffusion occur? Answering this question will require scholars to devote more attention to concepts such as imitation, emulation, and competition. Second, which political forces facilitate or impede policy diffusion? Answering this question will require scholars to devote more attention to the causal mechanisms at work when states adopt policies like those of other states. Third, what is being diffused? Answering this question will require scholars to think more carefully about the content of public policy, both as an outcome to be explained and as a factor that itself affects the diffusion process.

National Intervention and the Diffusion of Policy Innovations

Scholars have long recognized that national activity influences both the substance and the timing of state policymaking. This article examines whether the content of national legislation affects the state-level enactment of policy innovations even if it does not mandate their adoption or provide a financial incentive for state lawmakers to enact them. It uses event history analysis on pooled, cross-sectional data to examine the diffusion of three innovations in human services policy: individual development accounts, family caps, and medical savings accounts. Its results suggest that national intervention affects the likelihood that state lawmakers will adopt an innovation by altering the strength of the obstacles that prevent innovation or by providing resources to help overcome these obstacles. National intervention that does not affect these determinants of innovation seems to have no significant effect on state officials’ decisions.

Messages that mobilize? Issue publics and the content of campaign advertising

Does the issue content of campaign appeals mobilize particular subsets of voters? We examine whether issue content interacts with the interests and agendas of “issue publics,” focusing on the relationship between campaign messages and the turnout of senior citizens, veterans, and parents. Our analysis matches Current Population Survey respondents to media markets and then to relevant campaign advertising data in the 1998, 2000, and 2002 elections. We find that issue-specific campaign messages are not associated with higher turnout among senior citizens or veterans and are associated with only a small increase in turnout among parents. Our results suggest that campaign effects vary in their magnitude and importance for the mobilization of issue publics.

Why Do Governors Issue Vetoes? The Impact of Individual and Institutional Influences

Studies of presidential veto use advance two competing theoretical perspectives: the “president-centered” approach and the “presidency-centered” approach. We assess the applicability of these approaches to gubernatorial veto activity. Our analysis of forty-eight states between 1971 and 2002 provides strong support for the institutional perspective and less support for the individual perspective. The governors formal powers, the partisan alignment of the legislature, and the electoral cycle all contribute to veto activity. The results suggest that conflict between the legislature and the governor is a product of systematic forces and that governors who face similar institutional constraints will behave in similar ways.

Policy Diffusion and the Pro-innovation Bias:

Existing research on policy diffusion focuses almost exclusively on “successes” where many jurisdictions adopted the policy or policies under examination. Some have speculated that this “pro-innovation bias” compromises scholars’ ability to draw valid inferences about the factors that influence the diffusion process. We argue that the study of interstate compacts in the United States provides an analytic opportunity to assess whether these concerns are warranted because it allows us to examine an entire universe of cases with unusually wide variability in their adoption patterns. Based on a pooled event history analysis of the interstate compacts that are open to all fifty states, we conclude that the tendency to limit diffusion research to widely adopted policies affects the results of previous studies. Specifically, it appears to lead scholars to systematically overestimate the impact of geographic diffusion pressures and policy attributes, and to underestimate the importance of professional associations and the opportunity to learn from previous adoptions. In sum, the longstanding concerns about a pro-innovation bias in diffusion research seem to be warranted.

Venue Shopping, Policy Feedback, and American Preschool Education

Important public policy decisions are made in a variety of institutional settings in the United States, and this decentralization gives policy advocates an incentive to focus on the venue in which they are most likely to be successful. Th e phenomenon of venue shopping has long been recognized as a crucial element of the policymaking process, but less attention has been paid to its long-term consequences. 1 Recent scholarship on policy feedback, however, suggests that successful venue shopping may alter the terrain on which subsequent decisions are made. Advocates’ ability to achieve their objectives in a particular setting may aff ect temporally distant developments by creating constituencies with a stake in existing arrangements, in terms both of the government offi cials who are granted jurisdiction over policy decisions and of the program benefi ciaries with a stake in the choices these offi cials make. Th is article assesses the long-term consequences of venue shopping by tracing the evolution of American preschool education. In December 1971, President Richard Nixon vetoed a bill that would have dramatically ex panded the role of the national government in this policy area. Preschool advocates shift ed gears, experiencing greater success at the state level and expanding the reach of less comprehensive national programs. Th e entrenchment of these programs infl uenced subsequent congressional debates over

Rapid Diffusion and Policy Reform: The Adoption and Modification of Three Strikes Laws

Despite many important recent advances in the study of policy diffusion, this research has devoted limited attention to what happens after the adoption decision. This article attempts to fill this gap in diffusion research by examining the adoption and subsequent modification of “Three Strikes and You’re Out” laws in the American states. Its analysis suggests that distinct political forces affected state-level outcomes at these two stages of the policymaking process. The rapid spread of Three Strikes laws in the 1990s seems to have occurred because states with more conservative leanings and higher proportions of African-American residents gravitated to a salient and visible policy. In contrast, the modification of Three Strikes laws appears to have been encouraged by financial necessity and shifting ideological environments but hindered by the mobilization of stakeholders with an interest in preserving the status quo, including private prison operators and prison officer unions. The contrast illustrates the usefulness of treating policy diffusion as a multistage process, and the stakeholder mobilization results provide empirical support for recent theorizing about policy feedback effects.

Vertical Diffusion and the Shifting Politics of Electronic Commerce

Since the late 1990s, Congress and the states have debated how to treat electronic commerce for purposes of sales taxation. Frustrated by their limited progress at the national level, advocates of policy change attempted to generate vertical diffusion by using increasingly aggressive state-level actions to press Congress to act. The state initiatives provided national legislators with an “opportunity to learn,” and a systematic analysis of congressional policymaking suggests that vertical diffusion affected the early stages of the legislative process. State policies influenced the specific options that national officials considered, the rhetoric they employed, and, less consistently, bill cosponsorship patterns. The impact of vertical diffusion receded, however, as the congressional debate continued. Its muted effect during the later stages of the legislative process implies that national officials do not necessarily learn from what occurs in the “laboratories of democracy.” In addition to shedding light on the shifting politics of electronic commerce, this study illustrates the benefits both of studying the impact of vertical diffusion on individual decision-making and of conceptualizing vertical diffusion as a process rather than as an outcome to be explained.

The legislative politics of congressional redistricting commission proposals

Many politicians and reformers have suggested that allowing non- or bipartisan redistricting commissions to draw congressional districts will make elections more competitive and reduce partisan polarization. Although such commissions reduce the power of political parties and elected officials, they have been considered in 24 states from 1999 to 2006. We combine an analysis of national patterns of bill consideration with an intensive examination of legislative activity in three states. Our study suggests that internal pressures, such as redistricting controversies, and external pressures, such as the initiative process, contribute to the consideration of redistricting commission legislation. Furthermore, the precise combination of internal and external pressures in a state leads proposals to take one of two paths in the legislative process: a “partisan path” dominated by legislative insiders and interparty wrangling and a “good government path” where outside interest groups exercise more influence and the debate surrounds specific features of the proposal.