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Policy Diffusion Dynamics in America integrates research from agenda setting and epidemiology to model factors that shape the speed and scope of public policy diffusion. Drawing on a data set of more than 130 policy innovations, the research demonstrates that the 'laboratories of democracy' metaphor for incremental policy evaluation and emulation is insufficient to capture the dynamic process of policy diffusion in America. A significant subset of innovations trigger outbreaks - the extremely rapid adoption of innovation across states. The book demonstrates how variation in the characteristics of policies, the political and institutional traits of states, and differences among interest group carriers interact to produce distinct patterns of policy diffusion

This article explores the diffusion of criminal justice policy in the American states. Drawing on policy design theory, I code newspaper coverage of 44 criminal justice policies adopted across state governments from 1960–2008, identifying the image and power oftarget populations—the group singled out for special treatment under law. I test whether electoral pressure leads governments to disproportionally emulate innovations that reinforce popular stereotypes regarding who is entitled to policy benefits or deserving of policy burdens. I find strong support for this theory: State governments are more likely to adopt innovations that extend benefits to strong, popular, and powerful target populations or that impose burdens on weak and politically marginalized groups. This bias can be explained by pressures for responsive policy making, as my findings indicate that it is the national salience of the crime problem—but not the competitiveness or timing of state elections—that influences state adoption of popular "law and order" policy innovations.

This article builds on punctuated equilibrium theory to evaluate the diffusion of public policy innovations in the United States. The article argues that punctuated equilibrium theory provides a unifying framework for understating three mechanisms leading to the diffusion of innovations: gradual policy diffusion driven by incremental policy emulation, rapid state‐to‐state diffusion driven by policy imitation and mimicking, and nearly immediate policy diffusion driven by state‐level responses to a common exogenous shock. Drawing upon the Bass mixed influence diffusion model, this research generates measures of the coefficients of external and internal influences for diffusion for 81 public policy innovations that have spread across the United States. The article then evaluates how the policy image and direct participation of the federal government contribute to distinct patterns of diffusion over time.

AbstractThe passage of a restrictive immigration law in Arizona in 2010 rekindled an old debate in the United States on immigration policy and the role of federalism. Despite periodic constitutional controversies, scholars of federalism and U.S. state politics have not adequately explained variation in state-level policy making on immigration. The authors explore pressures leading to state immigration policy innovation and adoption in the United States. The article evaluates factors leading to the introduction and adoption of two types of policies: those dictating the cultural and economic incorporation of immigrants and those attempting to control their flow and settlement. Factors such as fiscal federalism, ethnic contact, and ethnic threat generate incentives for states to pass such laws. The authors compiled a comprehensive data set of state immigration laws from the past decade to explain how factors commonly associated with national immigration policy development—economic conditions, rates of immigration, demographics, party control, and political institutions—influence state-level immigration policy activity.

Abstract
This paper explores the speed of rulemaking in American state governments. Drawing on a unique data set of over 250,000 individual rules issued by states from 1993 through 2009, we introduce new measures of the speed and breadth of rulemaking in American state bureaucracies, providing a new way of evaluating the incidence of rulemaking delay within and across governments. We focus specifically on how professionalism and oversight powers of state legislative and executive branches affect rulemaking speed and find that states with more professionalized legislatures and governments with extensive legislative/executive oversight powers experience greater delays in rule adoption. These findings provide important new insights into the politics of regulatory delay and suggest disparate ways in which sub-national governments approach regulatory policymaking in a federal system.

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Scholars of American politics debate the consequences of polarized and divided government on lawmaking but have largely neglected the impact of institutional conflict on the policy outputs of the bureaucracy. We argue that lawmaking gridlock creates opportunities and demands for governors and civil servants to pursue policy goals through rulemaking. To explore these dynamics, we draw upon a comprehensive dataset of over 150,000 proposed and adopted rules issued by US state agencies from 1994 through 2009 and compare differences in rulemaking output within states across periods of divided and unified party control. We find that policy conflict (measured by the presence of a party divided legislature) leads to a 3%–7% increase in the number of proposed and adopted rules. We then explore how variation in state powers of legislative oversight affect rulemaking, and find that these effects are concentrated in governments with weaker powers of legislative review. Our research speaks to debates in the literature regarding the nature of bureaucratic policymaking and highlights practical consequences of legislative gridlock and partisan polarization.