Policy Learning, Policy Diffusion, and the Making of a New Order

By Covadonga Meseguer. 2005

376 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This article surveys the role of learning as mechanism of policy diffusion in the context of the creation of a new political order. The author discusses policy learning against the background of recent research on the diffusion of deregulatory and regulatory policies and attempts to distinguish learning from other mechanisms of diffusion. She then surveys the challenges entailed in testing this mechanism and sets out her particular approach: a rational version of learning. She also reports the results of preliminary efforts to test learning as applied to the diffusion of regulatory policies. The author concludes that learning cannot be rejected as a plausible mechanism of the diffusion of policies, although it shares its explanatory role with less rational mechanisms of diffusion, in particular policy emulation. Further research and analysis is needed to test learning in either its rational or its bounded version and, in doing so, to delve into the politics of learning.

Subfields: Political Science and International Relations, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/018459ec98fb598f564fe340ae32e8fff5c2ab41

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Citations in the corpus

Learning From Others (2009, background): “We define learning as a process whereby policy-makers use the experience of others to update their beliefs on the consequences of policies (Meseguer 2004; Meseguer 2005; Meseguer 2006b; Meseguer 2006a).”
Re-municipalisation in the early twenty-first century: water in France and energy in Germany (2013, background): “These include Polanyi’s (1944) pendulum swings, paradigm emergence and paradigm switch (Lobina 2012), policy learning and policy diffusion (Hemerijck and Visser 2003; Meseguer 2005), and advocacy coalitions (Sabatier and Weible 2007; Weible, Sabatier, and McQueen 2009).”
Organizations, Regulation, and Economic Behavior: Regulatory Dynamics and Forms from the Nineteenth to Twenty-First Century (2008, background): “As more nations adopt this model, the independent regulatory authority becomes increasingly institutionalized, increasing pressures on countries to follow suit as they privatize or liberalize industries (Meseguer 2005).”
The Global Diffusion of Public Policies: Social Construction, Coercion, Competition or Learning? (2007, background): “Sovereign debt, structural adjustment, and conditionality.”