Bulletin n. 3/2008
February 2009
CONTENTS
  • Section A) The theory and practise of the federal states and multi-level systems of government
  • Section B) Global governance and international organizations
  • Section C) Regional integration processes
  • Section D) Federalism as a political idea
    • Gilardi Fabrizio, Füglister Katharina
    Empirical Modeling of Policy Diffusion in Federal States: The Dyadic Approach
    in Swiss Political Science Review - Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Politikwissenschaft - Revue suisse de science politique , Volume 14, Number 3, Fall 2008 ,  2008 ,  413-450
    Policy diffusion is a common phenomenon in federal states: indeed, one of the normative justifications of decentralized policy making is that it permits the development and spread of best practices. Following Berry and Berry (1990), event-history analysis has been the method of choice for the quantitative investigation of policy diffusion, but Volden (2006) has recently introduced a dyadic variant of this method in which units of analysis are not states but, instead, pairs of states. This article discusses the dyadic approach with a particular focus on the diffusion of policies in Switzerland. The goal is not to introduce a new method, but rather to provide a practical overview for researchers interested in using it. The article shows how the method has migrated from the international relations literature to the policy-diffusion literature, describes the typical structure of a dyadic dataset in a diffusion context, and discusses several modeling issues. The usefulness of the dyadic approach is illustrated empirically with the example of health-insurance subsidy policies in Swiss cantons.
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