Collaborative Research: An Expanded Framework for Inferring Public Policy Diffusion Networks

州政府通常被称为“民主实验室？“因为几十年来，他们一直在尝试新的政策解决方案来解决社会上最重要的问题。公共政策学者和政治实践者经常向各州寻求可以被全国其他政府效仿的创新政策;这一过程被称为政策传播。然而，国家之间的复杂关系（即政策实际上如何从一个国家传播到另一个国家的模式、路径和机制）还没有得到很好的理解。在这项研究中，PI开发创新的工具和数据，以促进大规模的计算和数据密集型的政策扩散研究。他们寻求开发和利用最大的国家决策数据库，以更好地了解哪些国家是政策领导者，哪些是政策追随者，以及为什么。这将提供一个新的，广泛的，系统的观点，政策扩散过程，包括美国各州。因此，政策制定者和其他利益相关者将有机会全面了解州政府在金融、环境、健康、安全和其他社会问题领域的创新传播情况。技术方面本研究旨在为公共政策传播研究做出三个核心贡献。首先，它将建立一个关于美国各州数百项政策采用情况的数据库，将现有最大数据库的规模至少扩大两倍，并产生一个更能代表各国制定法律的政策范围的政策样本。它还将收集这些新数据，以绘制和分析网络路径，根据这些路径，政策传播（即，建立在政策传播方面既是领导者又是追随者的国家）。主要研究人员最近发表的研究表明，尖端的计算方法可以应用于大型数据库，这些数据库包含哪些政府何时采取政策的信息，以确定政策持续传播的潜在网络沿着。这项研究的另一个重要贡献是改进了现有的方法forinferred网络关系的方式，最适合政策扩散研究（以及关联科学更普遍），并在一个用户友好的软件包中实现它在R prosticalenvironment。最后一项贡献旨在最大限度地扩大这些数据和方法的潜在用户基础，将是建立一个数据的互动在线门户，并配有可视化和自动分析。

General SummaryState governments are commonly referred to as "laboratories of democracy?"because for manydecades they have experimented with new policy solutions to society's most important problems.Public policy scholars and practitioners of politics often look to the states for innovative policiesthat can be emulated by other governments across the country; a process referred to as policydiffusion. However, the complex relationships between the states (that is, the patterns,pathways, and mechanisms underlying how policies actually diffuse from one state to another)are not well understood. In this research, the PIs develop innovative tools anddata to facilitate the large-scale computational and data-intensive study of policy diffusion. Theyseek to develop and utilize the largest database on states' decisions to adopt policies to betterunderstand which states are policy leaders, which are policy followers, and why. This willprovide a novel, expansive, and systematic view of the policy diffusion process that covers theAmerican states. As a result, policymakers and other interested stakeholders will have access to acomprehensive look at the spread of innovation among state governments regarding financial,environmental, health, security, and other social problem domains.Technical AspectsThis research seeks to make three central contributions to the study of public policy diffusion.First, it will produce a database on the adoption of hundreds of policies in the American states, atleast tripling the size of the largest database currently available and yielding a sample of policiesthat is more representative of the universe of policies for which states make laws. It will alsoleverage these new data to map and analyze the network pathways according to which policiesdiffuse (i.e., establish states that are leaders and followers in the diffusion of policies). Asrecently published research by the principal investigators shows, cutting-edge computationalmethods can be applied to large databases containing information on when policies were adoptedby which governments in order to identify underlying networks along which policies persistentlydiffuse. Another key contribution from this research is to improve upon the existing method forinferring network ties in ways that are most suitable for policy diffusion research (as well associal science more generally) and implement it in a user-friendly package in the R statisticalenvironment. A final contribution, which is intended to maximize the potential user-base of thesedata and methods, will be to build an interactive online portal to the data, complete withvisualizations and automated analytics.