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Last week I had the pleasure of being on a roundtable on “Transnational Diffusion: Concepts and Mechanisms” at the ISA conference in San Francisco, together with Etel Solingen, Zachary Elkins, Detlef Jahn, and Covadonga Meseguer. In fact, diffusion was the … Continue reading →

A guest post by Oliver Strijbis, Sveinung Arnesen, Kjetil Thuen, and Lucas Rachow* ***** Two weeks ago we published on this blog the predictions taken from our prediction market on the outcome of the ballots from March 3. The predictions … Continue reading →

This is a guest post by Oliver Strijbis, Sveinung Arnesen, Kjetil Thuen, and Lucas Rachow* *** About one year ago we published on this blog for the first time predictions for direct democratic votes taken from our “prediction market”. Prediction … Continue reading →

This post is co-authored with Fabio Wasserfallen and is cross-posted (with a different title) at the LSE European Politics and Policy Blog. **** The creation of the single market is widely believed to have strengthened tax competition among European countries; … Continue reading →

This element shows, based on a review of the literature, how digital technology has affected liberal democracies with a focus on three key aspects of democratic politics: political communication, political participation, and policy-making. The impact of digital technology permeates the entire political process, affecting the flow of information among citizen and political actors, the connection between the mass public and political elites, and the development of policy responses to societal problems. This element discusses how digital technology has shaped these different domains, identifies areas of research consensus as well as unresolved questions, and argues that a key perspective involves issue definition, that is, how the nature of the problems raised by digital technology is subject to political contestation.

Over the years, independent regulatory agencies have become widespread institutions for regulatory governance. This book studies how they have diffused across Europe and compares their formal independence in 17 countries and seven sectors. It is intended for researchers and students in political science, public policy, and public administration

This article puts forward four strategies to improve policy diffusion research in political science: (1) use existing concepts consistently and improve their measurement, (2) clarify whether the goal is to improve the understanding of diffusion itself or to use diffusion research to explain another phenomenon, (3) pay more attention to the quality of the research design, and (4) discuss explicitly the practical implications of diffusion. Taken together, these recommendations trace a distinctive way forward for policy diffusion research.

This article investigates the supply side of women's political representation by focusing on how the election of female politicians affects the motivation of women to run for office in other units. The analysis relies on an original data set of over 1,500 municipal elections in Switzerland, starting with the first election after the introduction of women's suffrage. In the first election in which women could participate, the election of a woman in a given municipality was associated in the next election with an additional female candidate in 10% of its neighbors. The relationship decreases over time, fades away after 16 years, and is driven primarily by new female candidates in units where no female incumbents are running for reelection. These findings suggest that role models are important for improving women's representation, but only in its early stages. This conclusion could be relevant for understanding the political representation of other underrepresented groups.

The idea that policy makers in different states or countries may learn from one another has fascinated scholars for a long time, but little systematic evidence has been produced so far. This article improves our understanding of this elusive argument by distinguishing between the policy and political consequences of reforms and by emphasizing the conditional nature of learning processes. Using a directed dyadic approach and multilevel methods, the analysis of unemployment benefits retrenchment in OECD countries demonstrates that policy makers learn selectively from the experience of others. Right governments tend to be more sensitive to information on the electoral consequences of reforms, while left governments are more likely to be influenced by their policy effects.

Working from data of transnational depth and breadth, the author concludes that policy makers delegate in order to tighten the credibility of policy commitments and to tie the hands of future ministers who may have different preferences