Many countries globally have adopted national policy commitments to address violence against women (VAW). Yet the implementation of these policies largely relies on subnational governments’ actions. Why do some but not all subnational governments adopt policies to implement VAW response services? Surprisingly, few studies have addressed this question. Drawing on norm diffusion and gender policy reform theories, we assess the factors driving the adoption of these local policies in Indonesia. Since Indonesia adopted its domestic violence law in 2004, only one-third of cities/regencies have adopted local regulations (peraturan daerah) on VAW response services. Using event history analysis, we analyzed data from 509 cities/regencies from 2004 to 2022. Our findings show that the presence of local non-governmental organizations (NGOs) connected to national and transnational VAW advocacy networks, and women’s local legislative representation are significant factors. However, province-level morality regulations constrain the progressive effects of the VAW advocacy networks and women’s political presence.

While existing research on policy diffusion has provided substantial evidence regarding the drivers of policy adoption across jurisdictions, limited attention has been given to the dynamics of policy textual learning across different levels of government. We fill this gap by using regression analysis to examine the patterns of policy textual learning evident in the clause similarity of seven environmental statutory policies in China. Within China’s decentralized and multilevel environmental governance, our findings reveal that horizontal policy textual learning is more prominent than vertical learning. Temporal distance negatively impacts policy textual learning, whereas spatial distance, contrary to traditional policy diffusion perspectives, does not universally explain multilevel policy textual learning. Additionally, subsequent versions of policy texts are not necessarily similar to earlier ones, challenging conventional assumptions about the adoption and adaptation of policies over time.

The development of father leave policies marks a critical step toward gender equality in family policy. Despite promising policy developments, father leave policies continue to face resistance and negative feedback from various stakeholders, constraining their development. Their implementation has exhibited considerable variation across countries, ranging from mere symbolic gestures to substantive reforms. This article provides a comprehensive framework for understanding their evolution, emphasising that progress depends not solely on public support but on a mix of factors, including electoral competition, policy diffusion, negative feedback, and crises. The contrasting outcomes observed in South Korea and the Czech Republic highlight how similar drivers can produce divergent policy responses, challenging the view that drivers (like crises or electoral competition) have a predictable effect on policy change. This complexity necessitates a re-evaluation of existing theoretical frameworks to more accurately reflect the intricate dynamics at play in policy development.

This article proposes a theoretical framework for explaining the motivations behind the early adoption of international public policy innovations. While there has been a proliferation of transnational policy diffusion studies, there is less research on why some governments become early adopters when new international policy norms are promoted. Most research on the topic looks only at monocausal explanations without considering their interactions in a coherent, integrated framework. The article proposes four motivations for early adoption: normative, reputation, competition, and locking-in. The framework is then illustrated by application to the early adoption of business and human rights policy innovations, with Colombia and Ecuador serving as two cases for comparative analysis. The article advances understanding of early adoption and policy diffusion by highlighting particularly important explanations for what motivates early adopters to begin processes of subsequent diffusion and suggesting how motivations may interact to strengthen the case for early adoption.

Since 2014, the #BlackLivesMatter movement has worked to initiate police reforms designed to increase accountability and reduce the extrajudicial killing of Black and brown people. However, policy designs are typically congruent—meaning the allocation of benefits and burdens is generally aligned with how the target group is perceived by society. How could the movement motivate policy noncongruent action that would likely burden police—a group privileged by their position within a congruent, punitive, and racialized criminal justice policy culture? An examination of the innovation and diffusion of 12 noncongruent police reforms from 2014 to 2020 suggests the movement’s demands (1) reoriented the political and social contexts that fueled past diffusion processes, (2) activated key institutional actors—Black lawmakers—who served as entrepreneurs in state institutions, and (3) reactivated innovative states to serve as “leaders” in a new wave of noncongruent reform. This analysis provides a useful framework to understand how marginalized communities and their allies can exact real policy change in a political environment known for its unresponsiveness to the demands of marginalized groups.

Many studies of policy diffusion focus on what factors affect a policy’s adoption. Few studies specifically test the mechanism and two of the most common explanations – learning and emulation – have not been tested outside of legislatures. While judicial scholars have applied policy diffusion to several types of laws, we know little about the motivation behind why policies spread from court to court. One unexplored area is the relationship between courts. This short article analyzes the two mechanisms most likely to affect peer institutions: learning and emulation. Using network analysis methods on an original dataset of state supreme court citations from 1960 to 2010, I provide evidence that courts are learning from and not emulating each other, but the mechanism is policy-specific.

Conditional cash transfers (CCTs) are a striking case of policy diffusion in Latin America. Almost all countries in the region adopted the model within one decade. While most theories of diffusion focus on the international transference of ideas, this article explains that surge of adoptions by analyzing presidents’ expectations. Out of all ideas transmitted into a country, only a few find their way into enactment and implementation, and the executive has a key role in selecting which ones. Policies expected to boost presidents’ popularity grab their attention. They rapidly enact and implement these models. A process-tracing analysis comparing CCTs and public-private partnerships (PPPs) shows that presidents fast-tracked CCTs hoping for an increase in popular support. Adoptions of PPPs, however, followed normal procedures and careful deliberations because the policy was not expected to quickly affect popularity—which, in the aggregate, leads to a slower diffusion wave.

Policy diffusion is an important element of the policy formation process. However, understanding of the micro-level interactions governing policy spread remains limited. Much of the literature focuses on macro-level proxies for intergovernmental connectivity. These proxies outline broad diffusion patterns without specifying the micro-level mechanisms that govern how individuals facilitate that diffusion. The role of stakeholders in diffusion in the policy subsystem is also poorly understood. We construct a panel dataset covering the spread of the US ecotourism programs from 1993 to 2016 to investigate how micro-level movement within stakeholder networks explains state-level policy diffusion over time. Using fixed-effects regression, we find that stakeholder movement significantly drives diffusion, acting as a mechanism of knowledge transfer. Our findings provide a more precise theoretical understanding of how policy knowledge diffuses at the micro level, empirically explain the role of policy stakeholders in diffusion, and highlight the value of citizen-science data for policy research.

This study investigates what drives local variations when pursuing urban–rural equity in social welfare provision in China. We examine how internal features, top-down pressure and horizontal competition have shaped local governments’ decisions to adopt a policy that unifies (yitihua) the urban and rural eligibility thresholds of the world's largest means-tested cash transfer programme (dibao). We collected and coded policies that unify urban–rural dibao thresholds in 336 prefecture-level divisions between 2011 and 2019. Event history analysis showed that internal fiscal constraint – primarily cost concerns – drove local policy adoption; top-down pressure from provincial governments with a high degree of coercive power in policy directives exerted a significant impact; and the horizontal competition's effect was insignificant. Our findings indicate that fiscal arrangements and top-down policy directives from superior governments with higher coercive power are potent tools to accelerate the adoption of a social welfare policy that would otherwise be unappealing for local officials.

A steadily increasing number of European countries recently adopted their own ‘Africa policies’. The temporal and geographical clustering of such plans suggests that a policy diffusion process might have been at play, with the introduction and the shape of a policy in a given country being influenced by those of other countries. This paper tests the policy diffusion hypothesis through an in-depth analysis of the case of Italy, a country that in recent times stepped up substantially its engagement with sub-Saharan Africa. Tracing the origins and features of Rome's policy towards the region, however, shows that external influences were much more limited than expected. It was primarily two country-specific drivers – namely, the enduring effects of the European debt crisis on the Italian economy and a sudden and massive, if temporary, increase in irregular migration – which pushed Italy towards Africa and shaped its approach. The paper thus sheds light on how the marked resemblance of policies almost contemporaneously adopted by distinct EU member states – that is, a tight succession and a highly interconnected environment strongly pointing at cross-country influences – can hide motives and processes that are actually highly specific to each of them and essentially by-pass policy diffusion dynamics.

There is a substantial body of research that recognises the importance of analysing regional characteristics in employment and labour relations that occur in a given geographical context. However, this phenomenon has been scarcely studied from a spatial approach. This article uses a spatio-temporal panel data model to examine the spatial interactions between the gender employment gap and, some labour and socioeconomic characteristics of 727 municipalities of Andalusia, Spain, for the period 2012–2016. The results show that due to spatial diffusion mechanisms, a spatial spillover effect occurs in both the gender gap in employment and in some of the labour and socioeconomic characteristics considered. These findings may be extended to other geographic areas and can be of use for the implementation of regional policies aimed at narrowing the gender employment gap.

Do policymakers learn from the policy experiences of other governments, and if so, what do they learn? A long-established normative claim suggests that intergovernmental learning can and should occur among the US states, which serve as “laboratories of democracy” for the nation. We put this claim to a tough test, comparing the influences on the diffusion of instrumental Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers (TRAP) laws with that of more symbolic abortion regulation, from 1993 to 2016. We find evidence of substantive intergovernmental learning in policy diffusion even for abortion regulation—but only for instrumental abortion regulation. On symbolic abortion policy, states appear to learn mainly political lessons. Furthermore, proponents and opponents appear to learn different lessons in these diffusions, with loss aversion motivating opponents especially highly. Our results suggest that policymakers have a sophisticated understanding of the differences among policies’ goals and act strategically in pursuit of those goals.

This work explores the ways that federalism exacerbates gender inequality among women by explaining the adoption of domestic violence laws across different states in the context of policy diffusion. Using an original dataset of domestic violence firearm law (DVFL) enactments across all 50 states in the United States from 1990 to 2017, we analyze the circumstances under which states will adopt these laws. Using a set of political and demographic indicators as independent variables, we find evidence that state and federal factors influence policy adoption. In particular, the number of gun-related homicides, partisan control of the legislature, citizen ideology, federal policy, and election years each influence the likelihood of DVFL enactments. We find support for the effects of vertical policy diffusion on initial enactment of federal laws in this domain, but not for reauthorizations, which raises important questions about the continuous influence of the federal government on state policies.

This study aims to deepen our understanding of social investment expansion proposing a political learning mechanism to link existing institutional and political explanations. When resources are limited, increased spending in social investment often comes at the expense of politically costly retrenchment of established social insurance policies. Previous studies suggest that this trade-off results in existing entitlements crowding out new policies, and that party ideology plays less of a role in determining social policy expansion. I argue that this is because parties face an electoral dilemma, as individual preferences for social investment and social insurance have been shown to differ between groups that partly overlap in their voting behaviour. Applying a policy diffusion framework to the analysis of childcare expenditure, this study proposes that policymakers learn from the political consequences of past decisions made by their foreign counterparts and update their policy choice accordingly. The econometric analysis of OECD data on childcare expenditure shows that governments tend to make spending decisions that follow those of ideologically similar cabinets abroad and that left-wing governments with a divided electorate tend to reduce childcare expenditure if a previous expansionary decision of a foreign incumbent is followed by an electoral defeat. The findings have implications for the study of the politics of social policy development.

Relatively little is known about how late nineteenth-century associations worked to get their policy goals adopted by state governments. We study this question here, considering the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) and three policies it supported: scientific temperance instruction, increasing the age of consent, and prohibiting tobacco sales to minors. Overall, WCTU-supported legislation was more likely to succeed in states with unified Republican state legislatures, aided by neighboring state adoptions (scientific temperance) and greater WCTU membership (increasing age of consent and prohibiting tobacco sales to minors). These findings are supported by historical evidence, which reveals how WCTU leadership targeted particular states when lobbying for scientific temperance instruction laws and utilized its broad membership base to pressure state legislatures on the other two issues. In total, these results show how one late nineteenth-century membership group was able to facilitate the successful spread of its policies throughout the nation.