Federalism and the Politics of Bottom-Up Social Policy Diffusion in the United States, Mexico, and Canada

Extract

THE FORMATION OF SOCIAL POLICY IDEAS and instruments is a fundamentally spatial process.¹ After achieving their goals in one site of policymaking, change agents often actively work across scales and jurisdictional boundaries to enroll new adherents, construct policy “movements,” and consolidate policy norms and paradigms.² Yet studies of social policy diffusion carry a number of implicit biases about how and where such movements occur. Consistent with the often-employed metaphor of “policy diffusion,” many studies assume that social policy transfer is a horizontal process in which structurally equivalent jurisdictions—national governments, subnational territories, or municipalities—adopt efficient or politically congruous social programs.³ This focus ignores the role of policy actors in mobilizing ideas and instruments across jurisdictions with heterogeneous structural features. A growing number of studies of federal systems, however, suggest that policies pursued by lower levels of government, such as municipalities and states, can diffuse to higher levels of government, including national governments.⁴