This is such a great article! Thank you for writing it. Really interesting ideas.
Here’s a thing that came to mind when reading it.
You talk about policy diffusion seeming to be greater from high reputation countries. This seems quantifiable.
It seems both possible and powerful to build a map of the probability of policy diffusion from country A to country B for policy area X. (for all As, Bs and Xs). Simple example here (arrow size representing probability)
For example—this paper seems to have done something approximating this—see figure 1 in particular (although looks like it took a bunch of manual coding of parliamentary debate data).
The policy diffusion landscape has big implications for my own work (advising UK civil servants on where they can have impact in government), so really keen to talk to anyone working on this.
Hi Toby, thanks for the good insight and also relevant links—and apologies for the extremely delayed response! I thought I had already responded to this.
Agree that such a map would be valuable, though 1) I’m not sure if the data is rich enough to create a general map that works across all policy areas (due to substantial confounding factors throughout history), and 2) there may also be conceptual challenges (e.g., the strength of each arrow may differ by policy domain). Still, I think this is an important crux for the value of policy work in smaller countries, so agree that developing a better understanding would be valuable!
This is such a great article! Thank you for writing it. Really interesting ideas.
Here’s a thing that came to mind when reading it.
You talk about policy diffusion seeming to be greater from high reputation countries. This seems quantifiable.
It seems both possible and powerful to build a map of the probability of policy diffusion from country A to country B for policy area X. (for all As, Bs and Xs). Simple example here (arrow size representing probability)
For example—this paper seems to have done something approximating this—see figure 1 in particular (although looks like it took a bunch of manual coding of parliamentary debate data).
The policy diffusion landscape has big implications for my own work (advising UK civil servants on where they can have impact in government), so really keen to talk to anyone working on this.
Hi Toby, thanks for the good insight and also relevant links—and apologies for the extremely delayed response! I thought I had already responded to this.
Agree that such a map would be valuable, though 1) I’m not sure if the data is rich enough to create a general map that works across all policy areas (due to substantial confounding factors throughout history), and 2) there may also be conceptual challenges (e.g., the strength of each arrow may differ by policy domain). Still, I think this is an important crux for the value of policy work in smaller countries, so agree that developing a better understanding would be valuable!