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Failures: Diffusion, Learning, and Policy Abandonment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 January 2021

Craig Volden
Craig Volden*
Affiliation:
University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA
*
Craig Volden, University of Virginia, 235 McCormick Rd., Garrett Hall, #203, Charlottesville, VA 22904-4893, USA. Email: volden@virginia.edu
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Abstract

Studies of the diffusion of policies tend to focus on innovations that successfully spread across governments. Implicit in such diffusion is the abandonment of the previous policy. Yet little is known about whether governments abandon policies that have failed elsewhere, as would be consistent with states acting as policy laboratories not only for policy successes but also for failures. This article focuses on the possible abandonment of failing welfare-to-work policies in the formative years (1997–2002) of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program across the 50 U.S. states. Using a dyad-based event history analysis, I find that, if both states in a pairing have a policy and one state's policy fails (in employing welfare recipients, reducing welfare rolls, or reducing overall poverty rates), then the other state is much more likely to abandon that failing policy. Moreover, such learning from the other state's experience is more common when the states are ideologically similar to one another and when the legislature in the potentially learning state is more professional.

Keywords

federalstatefederalismpolicy innovationdiffusionpublic policywelfare policylegislative professionalismlegislative politicspooled time seriesquantitative methodsmethodology
Type
Research Article
Information
State Politics & Policy Quarterly , Volume 16 , Issue 1: Special Issue Title: Policy Diffusion , March 2016 , pp. 44 - 77
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2016

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