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

一般概述州政府通常被称为“民主实验室？”，因为几十年来，它们一直在试验解决社会最重要问题的新政策解决方案。公共政策学者和政治实践者经常向州政府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扩散。然而，国家之间的复杂关系(即政策实际上如何从一个州传播到另一个州的模式、途径和机制)并没有得到很好的理解。在这项研究中，私人投资机构开发了创新的工具和数据，以促进政策扩散的大规模计算和数据密集型研究。他们寻求开发和利用关于各州采取政策的决策的最大数据库，以更好地了解哪些州是政策领导者，哪些是政策追随者，以及为什么。这将为覆盖美国各州的政策扩散过程提供一个新颖、广泛和系统的视角。因此，政策制定者和其他感兴趣的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。技术方面这项研究试图对公共政策扩散的研究做出三个核心贡献。首先，它将产生一个关于美国各州采用数百项政策的数据库，至少是现有最大数据库的三倍，并产生更具代表性的政策样本，以供各州制定法律。它还将利用这些新数据来绘制和分析政策传播所依据的网络路径(即，建立在政策传播中作为领导者和追随者的国家)。主要调查人员最近发表的研究表明，尖端计算方法可应用于包含政策何时由哪些政府采取的信息的大型数据库，以确定政策持续传播的基础网络。这项研究的另一个关键贡献是改进了现有的以最适合政策传播研究(以及更广泛的社会科学)的方式推断网络联系的方法，并在R统计环境中以用户友好的程序包实施。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，它将建立一个与这些数据互动的在线门户，并完成可视化和自动化分析。

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.