Policy diffusion and european public policy research

Abstract

The vast and growing policy diffusion literature analyzes how policy-making in one jurisdiction—be it a country or a subnational unit—is influenced by prior policy decisions in other jurisdictions. Rather surprisingly, Europe remains an understudied area in the recent policy diffusion literature. This comes as a surprise because the European governance structure provides an ideal setting for applying the theories and methods of diffusion, given that policy-making in Europe is embedded in a vertically and horizontally integrated network of jurisdictions. This chapter explores the overlaps and distinctions between the scholarships on policy diffusion and European public policy and discusses how the advances of the more recent policy diffusion literature could stimulate further European public policy research. Particularly, the approach of diffusion scholars to study the mechanisms of interdependent policy-making with data on the connectedness between jurisdictions has great potential for improving our understanding of European public policy-making.