Question: How do you go about choosing a topic to research?
Craig Volden: So in American politics, people study Congress, or they study the states or they study elections. And I wasn't drawn to being in any of those particular boxes necessarily. I was interested in how do these different boxes interact with one another. How do institutions interact with one another? So, how does the national government interact with the states? How do states interact with one another? How does the Congress interact with the President or executive agencies and so on? And once we start to say, "Oh, there's been a lot of great work done in each of those boxes, but how do they relate to one another?" there's no shortage of questions. And so for my point of few, look at questions a little differently. Start to study interrelations between institutions and I have more questions than I know how to, how to deal with.
Q: What is policy diffusion and how did you come to study it?
CV: One of the big interesting questions in Federalism, which is an area that I'm very much interested in studying, is the idea that within American Federalism, states and localities can serve as policy laboratories. This idea has been around for hundreds of years and was well articulated about a hundred years ago. But we don't really know exactly how it works. And so political scientists have been wrestling with that frequently. The main idea that I'm interested in entertaining in states and localities as policy laboratories is how does policy spread or diffuse from one state to the next, or one locality to the next? Or even bubble up in a form of diffusion from localities to states. And the big idea that was floating around in this, in this literature was that there's a lot of learning going on. That states try a new policy, and if it works they might keep it, and pass it on to other states. If it doesn't work, they'd abandon it, and states would learn from one another. But there are a lot of other pressures that are going on, and when states are thinking about what they're adopting, or localities are thinking about what, what policies to adopt. They might be in competition with one another. There's this fear in welfare policy for example, that states are engaged in a race to the bottom. You don't want to attract welfare recipients from all sorts of other states. And so you lower your benefit levels. And so, what I've been interested in trying to do is disentangle these different approaches and these different ideas about how states and localities adopt policies.
Q: What are the ways that policy diffuses?
CV: People have been working on this idea of policy diffusion for decades and decades. And often they don't communicate well with one another and aren't necessarily clear on the mechanisms behind diffusion. For the longest time, this political science literature was just geographically focused. So, if I adopt a policy, is it a case that I adopted it because the surrounding states or surrounding communities also had that policy? And what we were thinking in this particular article is, is yes, that geographic element does make some sense. But that geographic element doesn't tell us how to break down, well, am I adopting what's found in my geographic neighborhood because I've learned that it works really well? Am I adopting it just because I want to look like my neighbors because they're doing well economically? They're attracting citizens? Or am I doing something because to some extent I am coerced? Right? You could imagine localities being forced by the state governments. You could imagine state governments being coerced by the national government through grant conditions and demands, and unfunded mandates. And indeed, we know that nations are forced into policies by other nations. And so we'd like to separate out, did a particular government adopt a particular policy for what we might call the right reasons. They've learned it's successful, or because they're just trying to copy whatever might score them some political points or, or for some of these other reasons.
Q: How did you measure whether a community is merely imitating another or actually learning useful lessons from its experience with policy?
CV: What we were thinking about in the paper was how could we try to isolate these different mechanisms from one another? What would it mean to learn from another community, another locality in the state? Or what would it mean to imitate them? And we have some sense of how those processes work, but there could be learning and imitation going on between any two communities. So how do we disentangle those? What we were drawn to is the idea that some of the literature has shown that the bigger cities, the wealthier cities, that those are going to be innovators. They're going to come up with ideas and the ideas spread from them. But they're also sort of perceived in a particular way. So Chicago is perceived as being the city to be copied in Illinois. And so the question is could we take advantage of that fact, that some of the larger cities might just be copied, not because they have a really great policy, but because they're seen as the leaders? Because they're seen as doing what maybe we should do, even if we haven't done the research to find out if the policy works or not. And so we could take advantage of the fact that the larger or wealthier communities are going to be the ones that you might just imitate, without learning about their policies being successful. And other communities around the state, maybe the smaller ones, are the ones who are going to only have an influence if their policy works really well. And so we wanted to separate out, let's see if we can find out what's going on throughout the state, the opportunity to learn from lots of different communities versus what's going on to the nearest neighboring cities and especially the bigger ones where you might just engage in imitation. It doesn't mean you're not going to learn from Chicago, there's a lot to learn. But it means that if we're trying to separate out those concepts, we can rely on that division between, we know there's more imitation of the larger cities, the wealthier cities, let's take advantage of that.
Q: In your research what turned out as you expected and what surprised you?
CV: So the, the basic questions here are what are the different mechanisms through which policies spread from state to state, country to country, locality to locality, and we just had the opportunity to look at it at the state level or at the local level on anti-smoking policies. So that's what we took advantage of. When we did so, we were thinking, well let's just isolate these mechanisms and see what we find. See if we can find different aspects. What really stunned us though was sort of some of the implications for how are policies created in big cities versus little cities, versus small towns and small communities. And it seemed like what we were finding is that the larger communities were better able to engage in learning, or less likely to just copy whatever was found in larger other communities or less likely to be coerced by the state's governments, or less fearful of competition that smokers are going to go to the next community over. And it's the small towns that were in pretty sad shape here. They weren't doing much in the way of learning. They were imitating and that might mean that they're adopting policies that were great for Chicago but bad for them. And that's, that's not so good for this process. We liked to think of policy diffusion as being a really healthy process. You learn the policy laboratory is going on and the, the fear that comes out of our, our final conclusions is that that might work well for the big cities. That might work well for countries. But for some states with not such professional legislatures, or some localities that are smaller and don't have the capacity to necessarily look out for the best solutions, this process is maybe undermining their policy. They maybe shouldn't be looking so much at what others are doing.
Q: What does your theory of policy diffusion tell us about anti-smoking policy in the United States?
CV: So, so the, the history of anti-smoking policy in the US is one of largely of interest group politics. At the national level there are some big tobacco interests that were stopping much legislation. At the local level there were a lot of grassroots support for policy change. And at the state level then, theses went back and forth, so who would win under what circumstances. So when this policy started spreading out, mostly started spreading out from California, although there were a few other, other pockets of how, how anti-smoking policies, smoking restrictions in restaurants, in bars, in government buildings, youth access to tobacco laws, many of those started in, in small communities in California and spread beyond that. And so, there were local battles in lots of different communities. And the flavors of those local battles were very interesting. So, we've seen recently, for example, the University of Illinois is centered around Urbana and Champaign, two, two small communities right next to each other. And in that case, there was sort of a fear of what we might call competition. This idea that if one of the communities adopted a smoking ban, say in restaurants, then all the people who wanted to smoke in restaurants would go over to the other community. They'd lose a lot of revenue. And so those two communities adopted simultaneously the same anti-smoking policies. And the idea was then we could overcome this competition by, by both adopting the policy at the same time. The idea of learning is, is taking place throughout this policy area, because we want to know, well do these policies actually work? Would it work to raise the price of a pack of cigarettes? Would that stop more youths from smoking? And so, there's some learning going on in lots of communities. There is the idea of imitation. And the idea of imitation is well, if Chicago has adopted an anti-smoking policy, would the surrounding communities, would Evanston want to adopt it to appear like Chicago, or does Evans, Evanston want to be its own, its own community and not, and not imitate so much? But going back to what I said at the beginning, anti-smoking policy is largely done throughout the 70' and 80's and into the 90's at the local level. And it was only later on that the states became involved. And those battles between the Big Tobacco interests, which were nationwide, and the local anti-smoking advocates were really taking place in the states. And one of the interesting things about state policy making the ban is that when the state had lots of local anti-smoking laws, the state government often had a battle between anti-smoking rights activists and Big Tobacco. And when Big Tobacco won, they would impose some coercive conditions down on the localities. They would, for example, say, "Here's the anti-smoking law." It is an anti-smoking law, but it's not very restrictive, and no locality can be more restrictive than the state law. And so that would pre-empt local laws. And so that was a battle taking place at the state level that very much influenced local tobacco policy as well.
Q: How does the establishment of national policies affect policy diffusion?
CV: I see sort of two things going on right now in American federalism. One is definitely that possibility of learning of policy diffusion across states and localities. The other is sort of a struggle back and forth between who's going to handle what problems? Is it going to be the national government or is it going to be the states and the localities? And so as the national government is taking a larger role in education with "No child left behind" and policing through the Clinton administration, and recently in health care, this means that we'll have maybe a more unified national policy. But I fear that we're losing some of the, the control by the states that tells us what's working, what's going to work really well. So, we have health care reforms, and the states are allowed to experiment. But will they be experimenting as robustly as they had without a, a national guiding policy. And we like to think that what's going on in the states is experimentation that might lead to a better national policy, so maybe that's where we are. But maybe we've adopted too early a national, a nationwide policy, and we haven't yet seen enough experimentation at the state level. So I see in health care, I see in education, I've seen a variety of other areas that the work that we've pointed to on how diffusion works, how policy learning works, might be a little undermined by national involvement. It doesn't mean that it's going to play out that way, but that's a concern that I have.
Q: What are your next steps for your research?
CV: There's a lot of opportunity here in the policy diffusion literature, and I'm taking advantage of some of that myself, in studying different policy areas, just because the context of those policy areas gives us new insights into politics. One that I'm very excited about right now is studying foster care policy. There are about ten states where foster care policy is handled at the county level. And in about half of those counties they privatize some of their foster care delivery services. We don't know a lot in political science as much as we should about what is governance through the private sector versus governance through the public sector. And the lens of policy diffusion allows us to say, is the private sector as innovative as the public sector and vice versa? So we could see innovations in foster care policy, how do they spread across those privatized counties, versus how do they spread across public counties? And what my preliminary research is showing, here, is that the counties that privatize their foster care services are more innovative up front, but the public counties learn from one another more quickly. And so new ideas are coming from these privatized counties that are picked up by the public counties and spreading across these states. And so, it's an, an interesting and very fun dynamic between the private sector and the public sector, and what could be done in the future in, in those areas. Another policy that I'm working on in terms of diffusion is, we've been doing this so long, thinking about policy spreading from state to state or locality to locality, but we also have diffusion everywhere. There are diffusion of medical devices across countries. There are diffusion of agricultural practices. And one that I'm working on in political science that stretches beyond this idea of Federalism, is the diffusion of campaign ideas. So in political campaigns, if something works really well in Wisconsin, are people in Arkansas going to pick up on it? Say, you know, oh, you had a really good idea for how to come up with an innovative tax policy for the state. Does the governor in another state who's running for office also advance that idea? So that would help us understand some of the mechanisms behind policy diffusion. Is it picked up even when we're very early on in articulating ideas in campaigns?
Q: How did you decide to pursue a career in political science?
CV: I grew up in Grand Forks, North Dakota and decided to go off to college as far away as I could. Which meant going to Cal Tech, in my case, to study aeronautical engineering. It was at Cal Tech that I realized, hey, political science actually is something other than what it was in my high school government class. There it felt like we were always talking about, you know, history and facts. And political science at Cal Tech, at least, involved quite a bit of what I call science. What I was excited about. We developed hypotheses. We learned to test those hypotheses. And I was really drawn to the possibility of, instead of doing engineering and science in, in more of the natural sciences, that I could do science still, but about things that I cared a lot about. About politics.
Q: Why is political science relevant to the real world of politics?
CV: I think political science is a very, very broad field. And some of it is very much relevant to politics and to policy, and others, other parts of the field are not. And my personal view is that, that's fine. Especially when we're learning about who we are in the world and how governance works. Whether we take classes that are immediately applicable to politics and, and write about policy, that doesn't matter as much. My personal work, however, is right at the line between politics and policy. I'm interested in what policies states and localities come up with for example. I'm interested in what policies come through interactions between Congress and the President. And as such I'm working on topics that are almost always relevant. And I've been consulted by the media, I've been consulted by policy makers, and so on. And so I, I have a feeling that the part of political science that I'm involved in is very current and is very active in back and forth between what we want to call real world politics and, and academic political science.