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The Theory Of Policy And Policy

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The first theory related to policy change is policy diffusion. Policy diffusion is the process that explains how and why policy innovations spread from one government to another. In the article The Mechanisms of Policy Diffusion (Shipan and Volden 2008), the authors made it very clear that uncovering the various mechanisms of policy diffusion is crucial to understanding when the devolution of policy control to states and localities is desirable. They proceeded by explaining the following four mechanisms to explore the conditions under which each of the four mechanisms drove policy diffusion in regards to the spread of antismoking laws across the 675 largest U.S. cities between 1975 and 2000. The first mechanism was policy adoption based on learning which is when policy adoption in one area is more likely if the policy has been successful elsewhere and success can be related to (a) the goals that the policy is designed to achieve, (b) the challenges of its implementation, and/or (c) its political support (Shipan and Volden 2008). After that they explained policy adoption based on competition for resources, which can produce undesirable outcomes (Shipan and Volden 2008). This mechanism is sometimes called economic competition because in some cases, if not most, the policy makers thoroughly evaluate the economic or financial effects of adoption (Shipan and Volden 2008). The next mechanism introduced was policy adoption based on the imitation of other governments by simply

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