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

Center for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences of the Juan March Institute (Madrid)

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.

Key Words: rational learning • bounded learning • emulation • policy reform • policy diffusion

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 598, No. 1, 67-82 (2005)
DOI: 10.1177/0002716204272372


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