How Policy Issues Spread: Network Position, Institutional Status, and Cross-Domain Diffusion

• In Event: Policymaking Across the American States

Abstract

Public policy typically involves multiple, interrelated policy issues, which means understanding how specific issues emerge, gain dominance, and become salient is critical to understanding the policy process. While the existing policy diffusion literature has extensively examined how policies travel across organizations and jurisdictions, far less attention has been devoted to asking why certain policy issues become salient and are subsequently taken up by different organizations. Drawing on over nine million policy documents produced by U.S. federal and state government agencies, think tanks, and intergovernmental organizations from the Overton database (2001–2024), we address three central questions: (1) How does the social status of organizations that previously adopted a policy issue affect its subsequent diffusion? (2) How does a policy issue's position within the broader ideational network shape its subsequent diffusion? (3) Does the growth rate of a policy domain moderate these conditions?To address these questions, we construct a longitudinal panel of issue-level adoption counts across 16 technology policy topics (including artificial intelligence, biotechnology, nuclear power, and telecommunications) and 14 years, and employ Poisson quasi-maximum likelihood regression with phrase-topic and year fixed effects, using the number of policy documents addressing a given issue in year t+1 as our dependent variable (N = 820,679). We further estimate interaction models incorporating the annual growth rate of each topic as a moderator, as well as stratified models of three stages of growth. On the social side, policy issues are more likely to diffuse when adopted by organizations that consistently engage with the issue across domains, while cross-domain social prominence is negatively associated with diffusion. On the ideational side, issues embedded in semantically coherent clusters of related concepts are more likely to diffuse, whereas cross-domain ideational prominence is negatively associated with diffusion. Taken together, ideational conditions tend to be more consistently associated with diffusion than social conditions. Regarding the moderating role of growth rate, among slowly growing topics, ideational embeddedness is the dominant driver while social prominence shows a consistent negative effect; among rapidly growing topics, both patterns attenuate, and the gap between ideational and social conditions narrows.These findings introduce a dual social–ideational framework for issue-level diffusion and offer an empirically broad examination of issue diffusion dynamics with implications for scholars and practitioners seeking to understand which ideas gain traction across organizational and jurisdictional boundaries. This study also contributes by providing an empirical base for systematically examining issue diffusion among diverse organizations—including federal agencies, state governments, think tanks, and international organizations.

Authors

• Doah Kwak, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology
  Presenting Author

• Seokkyun Woo, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology
  Non-Presenting Co-Author