Policy Diffusion in the Administrative State

• In Event: Policy Innovation, Diffusion, Retrenchment and Feedback: Recent Advancement

Abstract

Over the course of decades, policy diffusion scholars have focused on state and national legislatures to identify numerous pathways through which policies spread from one government to the next. Missing from much of this analysis, however, are decisions beyond legislatures, a significant shortcoming given that the vast majority of policymaking in the U.S. today occurs in the executive branch. In this paper, we argue that policy ideas also diffuse across the administrative state. Using data on regulatory paragraphs that have been borrowed between 1980 and 2020 across U.S. federal agencies, we show that agencies copy regulatory ideas from agencies with whom they have a shared ideological affinity, from agencies that have a strong reputation, and from agencies with high levels of professionalism. Our results highlight how cross-agency regulatory diffusion follows many of the same patterns observed in legislative settings, opening a new administrative frontier for scholars of policy diffusion.

Authors

• Rachel Augustine Potter, University of Virginia

• Charles R. Shipan, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

• Craig Volden, University of Virginia