Policy Inventing and Borrowing among State Legislatures

Abstract

Although a long literature has analyzed how policies diffuse or spread across the American states, scant attention has been given to how states invent or create original policy instead of borrowing existing policy from one another. In this article, I use state legislative policymaking with respect to renewable portfolio standards to examine when legislatures invent original policy instead of borrowing existing policy. I use a novel data set that includes the state adoption of hundreds of policy provisions, including their combinations, and I employ logistic pooled event history analysis to identify the determinants of inventing and borrowing. I find that government ideology largely predicts inventing, whereas electoral vulnerability predicts borrowing. The results suggest that ideologues spearhead invention and further suggest that democratic accountability works chiefly through promoting borrowing rather than blunting inventing.

The State of State Environmental Policy Research: A Thirty‐Year Progress Report

“…No articles were coded as dealing with the adoption or diffusion of individual policies during the first 9 years of this time period, but subsequently there has been a dramatic surge in attention to the topic, and it constitutes the second largest category of articles during the last decade covered (behind politics). The majority of the policy adoption work that appears after 2007 is the area of energy/climate, and has focused on why states adopt renewable portfolio standards, net metering policies, and other clean energy initiatives (e.g., Bromley-Trujillo, Butler, Poe, & Davis, 2016;Lyon & Yin, 2010;Matisoff, 2008;Nicholson-Crotty & Carley, 2016Parinandi, 2020;Stokes, 2020;Stoutenborough & Beverlin, 2008).…”

“…Any article that contained a quantitative analysis was coded as falling in the relevant quantitative category. 11 Parinandi (2020) was available online ahead of print when this dataset was compiled, but had not appeared in a published volume and therefore was not included in the dataset. 12 At its current trajectory, however, the energy and climate category will be the largest soon.…”

Which Legislators Pay Attention to Other States’ Policies? Comparing Cosponsorship to Floor Voting in the Diffusion of Renewable Portfolio Policy

“…This assumption of greater enthusiasm among the population of cosponsors comes from the idea that in choosing to cosponsor, cosponsors are committing to publicly endorse and support a bill in a way that members of the wider legislature are not (the assumption being that, ceteris paribus, it takes more enthusiasm about a bill to make such a public commitment than not do so). Higher enthusiasm has been linked to lower uncertainty (Parinandi, 2020; Weyland, 2007) based on the idea that greater belief in the intrinsic worth of a bill can serve as a substitute for needing confirmation that similar policy has been adopted in ideologically similar places; one may have less need for confirmation if one believes in the intrinsic merit of a bill. Given that cosponsors of a bill are assumed to be more enthusiastic about the bill than members of the wider legislature; given that ideological contiguity is a form of confirmation; and given that the adoption floor voting stage features greater participation from the wider legislature than the cosponsorship stage, 11.…”

“…One valuable detail that cosponsors could provide to co‐ideologues in their wider legislature is information about whether ideologically contiguous states have adopted a policy similar to the bill under consideration in their legislature, as knowing that ideologically contiguous states have already adopted similar policy makes legislators more likely to support a bill by giving those legislators confirmation that states with analogous preferences have adopted a similar policy (Grossback et al, 2004). Given the archetype of high‐effort cosponsors providing detailed information to co‐ideologue colleagues to raise bill support among those colleagues (Fowler, 2006a, 2006b), and given that ideological contiguity raises bill support among those legislators who exhibit greater uncertainty about the ideological fit of the bill (recall that Koger, 2003 links higher bill enthusiasm to cosponsors compared to members of the wider legislature, and recall that Weyland, 2007 and 2020 link greater uncertainty to lower enthusiasm), it is plausible that cosponsors might give information about ideologically contiguous adopting states to co‐ideologue colleagues to elicit their bill support.…”

“…This implies that compared to the first characterization, members of the wider legislature in the second characterization are less likely to view cosponsors as a go‐to source to provide confirmatory information about the ideological fit of the bill. However, it is precisely members of the wider legislature that derive greater value from such confirmatory information, as the wider legislature has been hypothesized to have less bill enthusiasm than cosponsors (based on the interview data in Koger, 2003); and as less enthusiasm has been linked (2020; Weyland, 2007) to greater uncertainty in decision making. Given that the signal gleaned from ideological contiguity can help resolve indecision by providing legislators with confirmation about bill fit (Grossback et al, 2004), it is plausible that members of the wider legislature could seek out this information to guide them with the decision to adopt.…”