POLICY DIFFUSION AND INNOVATION

 Introduction of something new  But what is really “new?”  For policy innovation, new is something new to the particular government that adopts it INNOVATION

 Explanations for adoption of a new program by a unit of government (often a state when we consider education)  Internal determinants  Political, economic, and social factors INSIDE a unit lead to adoption  Diffusion  Units adopt because other units adopted first POLICY INNOVATION AND DIFFUSION

 Mechanisms  Learning  Imitation  Normative pressure  Competition  Coercion  Diffusion models  Regional diffusion  Leader-laggard  National interaction DIFFUSION

 Units with higher levels of wealth, income, and education more likely to innovate  Larger units with more “disposable” resources more likely to innovate  Motivation to innovate based on:  Problem severity  Obstacles to overcome and resources available to overcome them INTERNAL DETERMINANTS

“although generally marked by stability and incremental- ism, political processes occasionally produce large-scale departures from the past.” (59) PUNCTUATED EQUILIBRIUM

 Equilibrium periods  Not much change happens  Punctuations  Big policy changes happen PUNCTUATED EQUILIBRIUM Stasis/ equilibrium/incrementalis m punctuation

 Positive feedback: when an issue is on macro-political agenda and small change in circumstances can cause large changes in policy  Negative feedback: stasis, maintains stability  Federalism, separation of powers, and jurisdictional overlaps inhibit major changes during negative feedback periods  But they also mean a movement in one subsystem may succeed, while it fails in another  Subsystems: equilibrium and parallel processing  Macro politics: punctuations and serial processing

 Issue definition  Agenda setting  An issue rises up from a political subsystem to the macro-political context and has the potential to lead to large-scale change  What causes an issue to rise?  Policy images  Bounded rationality  Policy monopoly KEY TERMS

 Stochastic  Random probability distribution- can’t be perfectly predicted  Normal distribution- mean of 0 and standard deviation of 1  Kurtosis: how sharply peaked a distribution is  Leptokurtosis: very sharply peaked distribution SOME TERMS DEFINED/ REVIEWED

 “when political conflict is expanded beyond the confines of expert-driven policy subsystems to other policymaking venues. It relies on the mechanism of policy image- a manner in which a policy is characterized or understood- and a system of partially independent institutional venues within which policy can be made” (82-83) GENERAL PUNCTUATION HYPOTHESIS

 According to punctuated equilibrium theory, how does a major policy change happen?  Is this theory testable?  “better applied work on policy change will occur with better theory; indeed, there is no substitute for this” (90) FOOD FOR THOUGHT