by José Tulio Gálvez Contreras, Ph.D. Student in Public and Urban Policy
We cannot ignore the fact that today we live in a very interconnected global society. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google, Yahoo, Yelp and so many more are all mechanisms that keep our minds busy every day while they also connect us to others who otherwise would not exist in our immediate realities. Sure, we are crowded with information, but nonetheless, this information teaches us something new about the various people and cultures around the world. For instance, the U.S. election, widely broadcasted by the different news media across world, has revealed preferences of certain cultures for one particular candidate over the other. Many Latin Americans from various nations have expressed their strong partiality for candidate Hillary Clinton because of the economic repercussions they envision for their countries if her opponent candidate is elected. The U.S. election is just a surface example of how the globalization phenomenon, coupled with technological innovations, allows for people, ideas, and goods to spread throughout the world, spurring more interactions and integration of the world’s people, governments, and economies. Along with technological innovations, international organizations, treaties and associations also contribute to the growing interdependence that has become a key feature of political environments. Therefore, today more than ever before, it is necessary to clearly understand policy diffusion across a nation and whether or not convergence brings pathways to solutions that can address unprecedented political phenomena, such as conflict, cooperation, collective action, and time-sensitive decisions among cultures.
Policy diffusion is a process by which policy choices are interdependent, that is, in which a choice made by one decision-maker influences the choices made by other decision-makers, and is in turn influenced by the sociopolitical environments in which these decision-makers operate. In Theories of Policy Diffusion, Weyland suggests frameworks that describe the spread of policy innovations, including external pressure, normative imitation, rational learning and cognitive heuristics. As Scholar Ado point out, in Weyland’s view external pressures—forces acting from the outside—such as coercion from international organization (i.e. WTO or IMF) explain the rapid pace of policy diffusion among states. But as Scholar Mina Ado highlights in her précis, coercion does not provide explanation for geographic clustering. Weyland’s second framework of normative imitation fits the quest for legitimization as a principal motivation of a country, however multiple factors often come to play. Rational choice, on the other hand, proposes an alternate view to coercive and normative explanations by assuming that policy decisions result from an analysis of options to determine which policy maximizes utility, but it does not illuminate why countries with different characteristics would accept the same policy. Weyland, finally, proposes the cognitive heuristic framework, which believes humans use assumptions to cope with limited ability to retain and process information. In his study, he identifies that the cognitive-psychological approach, which emphasizes decision heuristics, provides a good explanation for how pension policy diffused in Latin America in the 1980s.
In a similar way, Charles R. Shipan and Craig Volden in The Mechanisms of Policy Diffusion shed light at the fact that policy diffusion is a process where pressure comes from outside the policy, with the spread of innovations from one government to another. Shipan and Volden’s focus on the mechanisms. From stand point, diffusion naturally starts out from the description of adoption patterns for certain policy innovations over time. The subsequent steps involve economic competition among proximate cities, imitation of larger cities, and coercion by state governments. These steps are all factors that account for the empirically observed spreading process. According to this concept of diffusion, no difference in diverse forms of ‘spread mediation’ or ‘influence processes’ is made. Hence, from this perspective, policy diffusion is not limited to the operation of specific negotiation mechanisms, but includes all possible channels of coercion between countries, reaching from the voluntary adoption of policy models that have been communicated in the international system, diffusion processes triggered by legally binding coordination requirements defined in international agreements or supranational regulations, to the imposition of policies on other countries through external actors.
What Weyland and Shipan and Volden provide is good explanations of the types of theories and mechanisms of policy diffusion, but do not address is the fact that globalization has altered the international political economy through the generation of a new set of contentious global issues that were previously purely national. Beside diffusing policies begin to converge. Convergence is essentially the tendency of policies to grow more alike, in the form of increasing similarity in structures, processes, and performance. This is more evident every day, month, and year. Just recently, Habitat III was hosted in Quito to discuss the future of cities. Now, majors of these places are charged with the responsibility to coordinate efforts in order to meet specific goals for sustainable development. Therefore, it is important to pay attention to what Drezner in his essay Globalization and Policy Convergence has to say. He acknowledges the fact that globalization involves cluster of technological, economic, and political innovations that have drastically reduced the barriers to economic, political, and cultural exchange. He also raises attention to the fact that many policy analysts and some academics assume that globalization leads to convergence of national public policies governing environment, public health and safety, labor, and ability to tax capital. At the same time, he acknowledges that theories of policy convergence diverge on whether the driving force is economic or ideational, and whether states retain agency in the face of globalization or are dominated by structural determinants. A comparison of these theories show that structural models (RBT and world society) have comparative advantage of elegance, in that causal mechanisms and predicted outcomes are clear. These structural approaches are also more parsimonious because the key variables are hypothesized to overwhelm all other explanatory factors. The agent oriented models (neoliberal institutionalism and elite consensus) permit multiple possible outcomes. This makes these approaches potentially more realistic but more difficult to falsify.
Nonetheless, Drezner admits that even though an increasing number of studies on policy convergence are becoming more evident, there is still a rather limited understanding of this phenomenon. Therefore, in response to Ado’s question on how to solve unprecedented problems, convergence is one medium from which to study. As we become more globally connected, we also become more interdependent. Issues such as climate change are unprecedented and we have to move away from the boundaries that have limited our thinking. If convergence of policy is key to find solutions to serious new problems and a way to resolve past ones, then it is necessary to figure out what types of policies should be placed in the negotiation table. It takes time, discussion, and conversations among all affected actors. And in all reality, there is opportunity to learn from policy convergence. It is necessary to paint the big picture first and then begin to execute a reality that works for everyone.
We cannot ignore the fact that today we live in a very interconnected global society. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google, Yahoo, Yelp and so many more are all mechanisms that keep our minds busy every day while they also connect us to others who otherwise would not exist in our immediate realities. Sure, we are crowded with information, but nonetheless, this information teaches us something new about the various people and cultures around the world. For instance, the U.S. election, widely broadcasted by the different news media across world, has revealed preferences of certain cultures for one particular candidate over the other. Many Latin Americans from various nations have expressed their strong partiality for candidate Hillary Clinton because of the economic repercussions they envision for their countries if her opponent candidate is elected. The U.S. election is just a surface example of how the globalization phenomenon, coupled with technological innovations, allows for people, ideas, and goods to spread throughout the world, spurring more interactions and integration of the world’s people, governments, and economies. Along with technological innovations, international organizations, treaties and associations also contribute to the growing interdependence that has become a key feature of political environments. Therefore, today more than ever before, it is necessary to clearly understand policy diffusion across a nation and whether or not convergence brings pathways to solutions that can address unprecedented political phenomena, such as conflict, cooperation, collective action, and time-sensitive decisions among cultures.
Policy diffusion is a process by which policy choices are interdependent, that is, in which a choice made by one decision-maker influences the choices made by other decision-makers, and is in turn influenced by the sociopolitical environments in which these decision-makers operate. In Theories of Policy Diffusion, Weyland suggests frameworks that describe the spread of policy innovations, including external pressure, normative imitation, rational learning and cognitive heuristics. As Scholar Ado point out, in Weyland’s view external pressures—forces acting from the outside—such as coercion from international organization (i.e. WTO or IMF) explain the rapid pace of policy diffusion among states. But as Scholar Mina Ado highlights in her précis, coercion does not provide explanation for geographic clustering. Weyland’s second framework of normative imitation fits the quest for legitimization as a principal motivation of a country, however multiple factors often come to play. Rational choice, on the other hand, proposes an alternate view to coercive and normative explanations by assuming that policy decisions result from an analysis of options to determine which policy maximizes utility, but it does not illuminate why countries with different characteristics would accept the same policy. Weyland, finally, proposes the cognitive heuristic framework, which believes humans use assumptions to cope with limited ability to retain and process information. In his study, he identifies that the cognitive-psychological approach, which emphasizes decision heuristics, provides a good explanation for how pension policy diffused in Latin America in the 1980s.
In a similar way, Charles R. Shipan and Craig Volden in The Mechanisms of Policy Diffusion shed light at the fact that policy diffusion is a process where pressure comes from outside the policy, with the spread of innovations from one government to another. Shipan and Volden’s focus on the mechanisms. From stand point, diffusion naturally starts out from the description of adoption patterns for certain policy innovations over time. The subsequent steps involve economic competition among proximate cities, imitation of larger cities, and coercion by state governments. These steps are all factors that account for the empirically observed spreading process. According to this concept of diffusion, no difference in diverse forms of ‘spread mediation’ or ‘influence processes’ is made. Hence, from this perspective, policy diffusion is not limited to the operation of specific negotiation mechanisms, but includes all possible channels of coercion between countries, reaching from the voluntary adoption of policy models that have been communicated in the international system, diffusion processes triggered by legally binding coordination requirements defined in international agreements or supranational regulations, to the imposition of policies on other countries through external actors.
What Weyland and Shipan and Volden provide is good explanations of the types of theories and mechanisms of policy diffusion, but do not address is the fact that globalization has altered the international political economy through the generation of a new set of contentious global issues that were previously purely national. Beside diffusing policies begin to converge. Convergence is essentially the tendency of policies to grow more alike, in the form of increasing similarity in structures, processes, and performance. This is more evident every day, month, and year. Just recently, Habitat III was hosted in Quito to discuss the future of cities. Now, majors of these places are charged with the responsibility to coordinate efforts in order to meet specific goals for sustainable development. Therefore, it is important to pay attention to what Drezner in his essay Globalization and Policy Convergence has to say. He acknowledges the fact that globalization involves cluster of technological, economic, and political innovations that have drastically reduced the barriers to economic, political, and cultural exchange. He also raises attention to the fact that many policy analysts and some academics assume that globalization leads to convergence of national public policies governing environment, public health and safety, labor, and ability to tax capital. At the same time, he acknowledges that theories of policy convergence diverge on whether the driving force is economic or ideational, and whether states retain agency in the face of globalization or are dominated by structural determinants. A comparison of these theories show that structural models (RBT and world society) have comparative advantage of elegance, in that causal mechanisms and predicted outcomes are clear. These structural approaches are also more parsimonious because the key variables are hypothesized to overwhelm all other explanatory factors. The agent oriented models (neoliberal institutionalism and elite consensus) permit multiple possible outcomes. This makes these approaches potentially more realistic but more difficult to falsify.
Nonetheless, Drezner admits that even though an increasing number of studies on policy convergence are becoming more evident, there is still a rather limited understanding of this phenomenon. Therefore, in response to Ado’s question on how to solve unprecedented problems, convergence is one medium from which to study. As we become more globally connected, we also become more interdependent. Issues such as climate change are unprecedented and we have to move away from the boundaries that have limited our thinking. If convergence of policy is key to find solutions to serious new problems and a way to resolve past ones, then it is necessary to figure out what types of policies should be placed in the negotiation table. It takes time, discussion, and conversations among all affected actors. And in all reality, there is opportunity to learn from policy convergence. It is necessary to paint the big picture first and then begin to execute a reality that works for everyone.