Craig Volden

A Formal Model of Learning and Policy Diffusion

We present a model of learning and policy choice across governments. Governments choose policies with known ideological positions but initially unknown valence benefits, possibly learning about those benefits between the models two periods. There are two variants of the model; in one, governments only learn from their own experiences, whereas in the other they learn from one anothers experiments. Based on similarities between these two versions, we illustrate that much accepted scholarly evidence of policy diffusion could simply have arisen through independent actions by governments that only learn from their own experiences. However, differences between the game-theoretic and decision-theoretic models point the way to future empirical tests that discern learning-based policy diffusion from independent policy adoptions.

The Diffusion of Policy Diffusion Research in Political Science

Over the past fifty years, top political science journals have published hundreds of articles about policy diffusion. This article reports on network analyses of how the ideas and approaches in these articles have spread both within and across the subfields of American politics, comparative politics and international relations. Then, based on a survey of the literature, the who, what, when, where, how and why of policy diffusion are addressed in order to identify and assess some of the main contributions and omissions in current scholarship. It is argued that studies of diffusion would benefit from paying more attention to developments in other subfields and from taking a more systematic approach to tackling the questions of when and how policy diffusion takes place.

The Politics of Competitive Federalism: A Race to the Bottom in Welfare Benefits?

tion in benefit changes across the states. This article argues that a more accurate specification of welfare politics focuses on the presence or absence of actual legislated payment increases in the face of inflation. Logit and ordered logit analyses of pay? ment changes under the AFDC pro? gram in the states from 1975 to 1990 show the role of inflation and political considerations in determining benefit adjustments. Rather than states ac? tively undercutting one another to avoid becoming welfare magnets, this article supports a different version of competitive federalism. States wish to increase their welfare benefits, but hesitate until neighboring states do the same.

The Role of Policy Attributes in the Diffusion of Innovations

Studies of policy diffusion have given insufficient attention to the role that characteristics of the policies themselves play in determining the speed of policy diffusion and the mechanisms through which diffusion occurs. We adopt Everett Rogers’ (1983, 2004) attribute typology from the diffusion of innovations literature and apply it to a sample of 27 policy innovations from the sphere of criminal justice policy in the U.S. states between 1973 and 2002. We find that policy attributes, ranging from the relative advantage of the policy over its predecessors to its complexity to its compatibility with past practices, affect the likelihood of adoption. Furthermore, policy attributes shape the extent to which spatial adoption patterns and learning mechanisms are relevant to the policy’s diffusion.

How Strong Should Our Party Be? Party Member Preferences Over Party Cohesion

In this article, we seek to explain when and why political parties pressure their members to vote with the party. We model party cohesion as an endogenous choice of preference alignment by party members. Couched in Krehbiels (1996, 1998) pivotal politics model, the formal theory advanced here shows party cohesion to be related to the initial preference alignment of party members, the divergence in preferences between parties, the cohesion of the opposing party, the partys size, and the partys majority or minority status. We solved the model analytically for generalized-partial equilibrium results and further analyzed it through computer simulations. We tested the models predictions in the U.S. Senate using Rice party cohesion scores from the 46th through 104th Congresses. The data analyses show strong support for this theory of endogenous choice of party pressure.

Sophisticated Voting in Supermajoritarian Settings

Empirical support for sophisticated voting in the legislative setting has been sparse This is due to a number of factors, including the difficulty of identifying the ideal points of legislators in multidimensional spaces Whereas the conflict between sincere and strategic voting typically arises in such multidimensional settings, such conflict can also be found with respect to varied voting rules In this paper, the supermajority rules surrounding vetoes and cloture votes are examined to show their role in producing sophisticated voting outcomes. A single-dimensional model is developed that predicts sophisticated voting in two broad cases An empirical test with regard to votes on the 1989 minimum wage increase in the House of Representatives provides strong support for this theory Sincere voting is rejected, while sophisticated voting is supported, even when costly.

When the smoke clears: expertise, learning and policy diffusion

In federal systems, governments have the opportunity to learn from the policy experiments – and the potential successes – of other governments. Whether they seize such opportunities, however, may depend on the expertise or past experiences of policymakers. Based on an analysis of a dataset on state-level adoptions of youth access antismoking adoptions, we find that states are more likely to emulate other states that have demonstrated the ability to successfully limit youth smoking. In addition, we find that political expertise (as captured by legislative professionalism) and policy expertise (as captured by previous youth access policy experiments at the local level) enhance the likelihood of emulating policy successes found in other states.

Privatization and the Diffusion of Innovations

The privatization of government services tends to bring about a more rapid adoption of innovative policies due to the competitive pressures of the market. In federal systems, however, the diffusion of innovations across subnational governments may offset such benefits of privatization. In this study, we test whether county governments that have privatized their provision of foster care services are more or less likely to adopt policy innovations and more or less likely to learn from the policies of other counties than are those that have resisted privatization. We explore the diffusion of four innovative foster care policies across 384 counties in five states between 1995 and 2006. We find that the initial innovativeness arising from the market competition of privatization is counterbalanced by learning across public diffusion networks.

Who Heeds the Call of the Party in Congress

When party leaders seek support, who heeds the call and who remains unswayed? The canonical error-free spatial model of voting predicts the targeting of fence-sitting moderates. In contrast, we advance a random-utility-based model of party calls, wherein legislators who benefit the most from a common party position respond to the call of party leaders. This model predicts that extremists will heed the call of the party more than moderates, even upon controlling for baseline rates of voting with the party. To test this prediction, we develop a new method to identify “party-influenced votes,” to generate estimates of “party-free ideal points,” and to examine rates of responsiveness to political parties across members in the House of Representatives between 1973 and 2006. We find that, contrary to common portrayals of party influence, those most responsive to their parties are not the chamber moderates. Rather, responsiveness is greatest for ideological extremists in both the majority and minority parties, declining significantly among more moderate members. This finding sets the stage for new theoretical and empirical work on the role of parties in Congress.

Means, Motive, and Opportunity Politics, Community Needs, and Community Oriented Policing Services Grants

Both local and national political considerations may play a role in determining the distribution of intergovernmental grant funds. This article focuses on the Community Oriented Policing Services program from 1993 to 1997 to examine how local politicians weigh their electoral desires against community needs in their decisions to apply for grants and how national politicians and bureaucrats similarly determine their responses to cities’ requests. Due to electoral pressures, mayors were more likely than city managers to seek the short-term grants. National party politics also seemed to affect the allocation of grant funds. Finally, community needs played a role, as cities with high crime rates, police-funding shortages, and the ability to support the new officers after the grants expired were more likely to request grants. Communities with larger minority populations were less likely to request grants and were given fewer funds.