This is great and under-emphasized. I think it was @weeatquince who told me that the primary determinant of what gets implemented by governments is what has successfully been tried before, and while I haven’t seen much empirical data on this it strikes me as plausible.
One counter-point comes from Michael Rose’s book Zukünftige Generationen in der heutigen Demokratie, which finds that low institutional path-dependence (approximated by the rate of recent constitutional changes) had no effect on the institutionalization of powerful proxies for future generations in a (pretty small) fuzzy-set analysis.
On the other hand, former Welsh minister Jane Davidson says that Wales was able to implement their Well-being of Future Generations Act due to the innovativeness of the Welsh government in her new book #FutureGen.
In addition to seeing more EAs get into innovative governments to run policy experiments, it would be great to see further research on policy diffusion and on the importance and proper characterization of governmental innovativeness in the sense you outline here.
The references are great, I wasn’t aware of them. Re the first, how exactly do you think low institutional path-dependence and institutional innovativeness interact? They seem like related but distinct concepts to me.
I agree that it would be great to see more research on those questions, though I wonder if a thorough review of the policy diffusion literature might be sufficient. I definitely would like a clearer characterization of governmental innovativeness; I felt kind of hand-wavey in this post.
This is great and under-emphasized. I think it was @weeatquince who told me that the primary determinant of what gets implemented by governments is what has successfully been tried before, and while I haven’t seen much empirical data on this it strikes me as plausible.
One counter-point comes from Michael Rose’s book Zukünftige Generationen in der heutigen Demokratie, which finds that low institutional path-dependence (approximated by the rate of recent constitutional changes) had no effect on the institutionalization of powerful proxies for future generations in a (pretty small) fuzzy-set analysis.
On the other hand, former Welsh minister Jane Davidson says that Wales was able to implement their Well-being of Future Generations Act due to the innovativeness of the Welsh government in her new book #FutureGen.
In addition to seeing more EAs get into innovative governments to run policy experiments, it would be great to see further research on policy diffusion and on the importance and proper characterization of governmental innovativeness in the sense you outline here.
Thanks for this Tyler!
The references are great, I wasn’t aware of them. Re the first, how exactly do you think low institutional path-dependence and institutional innovativeness interact? They seem like related but distinct concepts to me.
I agree that it would be great to see more research on those questions, though I wonder if a thorough review of the policy diffusion literature might be sufficient. I definitely would like a clearer characterization of governmental innovativeness; I felt kind of hand-wavey in this post.