How does a policy become diffused?

Among the main questions about policy studies are: how a policy is created and how does it become succesful?

The proccess of creation of a policy is long and requires a long process of ideas, “recombinations” and “softening up”, acording to Kingdom, 2011. A lot of researchers, congressional staffers, plannning and evaluation officers, academics are studying solutions to create policies to help government solving the everyday problems and concerns, but how does a policy get diffused?

In 1962, Everett Rogers, in Diffusion of Innovations, wrote what is considered the first theoretical synthesis of the proccess of diffusion. Rogers identified five key elements common to all diffusion processes (adoption): Innovation, Adopters, Communication, Time and Social System

• In his framework, he divided adopters in five categories:

Also in Rogers’s framework, diffusion occurs through a five–step decision-making process: knowledge, persuasion, decision, implementation, and confirmation. Giving us an idea on how a policy can be choosen among others.

In another interesting study on diffusion of policies (Simmons, Dobbin and Garrett), we can find out four mechanisms on how new ideas spread:

• Coercion: policies imposed or pressured by ocal government
• Emulation: related to adoption because of social or political values in addition to the primary function
• Competition: ex.: cities encouraged to adopt policies to obtain resources
• Learning: ex.: city use another city policy as benchmark to find a solution to some problem.

The policy adoption has no strict formula or certainty, but it can be settled easily if based on one of those favorable conditions (political, social…) and mechanisms.

If anyone has more interest on that, this video is an awesome reference.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=72&v=NMwatEye2zQ

References:
- Kingdom, 2011- Agendas, Alternatives and Public Policies
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations
- Kontokosta, Constantine E. 2011. “Greening the Regulatory Landscape: The Spatial and Temporal Diffusion of Green Building Policies in U.S. Cities,”Journal of Sustainable Real Estate 3: 68–90.
- Dobblin, Simmons and Garrett — The Global Diffusion of Public Policies: Social Construction, Coercion, Competition, or Learning?