A Leadership-Context Model of Policy Tourism and Policy Diffusion

• In Event: Policy Learning through Networks and Diffusion

Abstract

Policy tourism is a scheduled trip taken by a multi-sector delegation of one city’s leaders to another city to engage in dialogue with their counterparts, learn lessons and best practices on timely issues and program areas, and facilitate intercity policy exchange and diffusion in economic development and community building (Cook and Ward 2011). Policy tourism draws attention from public administration and policy scholars and practitioners as it facilitates the spread and adaptation of innovative ideas, programs, and initiatives across communities and strengthens relationship building through intercity, interorganizational, and interpersonal networking, improving the performance at organizational and individual levels.
Unquestionably, we find much to acclaim in extant work on policy tourism and a similar externally and horizontally oriented networking effort described as “managerial networking”. Despite these efforts, policy tourism has rarely been conceptualized as an important mechanism of policy diffusion, through which policy practices and ideas get communicated across cities (Hudson and Kim 2014; Ma 2017). Further, these studies are mostly descriptive or mainly emphasizing the managerial networking-performance relationship. Few have examined factors triggering the occurrence of policy tourism. Additionally, these studies are all based upon a sole-actor research design, overlooking the interactions between pairs of cities and how they impact the decision to partake in policy tourism.
A prominent feature of policy tourism is the interdependence and interconnectedness between dyads of cities, as they need to decide collectively upon the match between the cities, the discussion topics, the logics of the visits, and the best timing of visits. What is worthy of a closer examination is what factors shape the patterns of policy tourism between dyads of cities, which cities are more likely to learn from others (a visitor or learner), which cities are more likely to be chosen as a learning target (a visitee or learnee), and what help match them in a tourism event.
In this study, we look at the system of hundreds of policy tourism visits rather than one or two policy tourism events. Under this framework, we propose a set of hypotheses regarding what factors trigger policy tourism between pairs of cities. We argue that the personal characteristics of executive leadership at the micro level, such as gender, race, tenure and experience, play significant roles in determining whether to engage in policy tourism. The macro-level city conditions, typified by disparate facets of institutional and task environments, also influence the initiation of policy tourism. Additionally, we examine learning, competition, and imitation in the context of policy diffusion via policy tourism. To test our hypotheses, we collect and analyze a national dataset on policy tourism from 2007 to 2016 across 310 cities in the U.S., as chosen by population size, with which we estimate two-stage probit selection models with instrumental variables. Our findings suggest that cities with less experienced leaders tend to visit those incumbent leaders with shorter tenure. Cities with minority leaders tend to visit cities with white or female leaders. Additionally, cities tend to interact with their competitors. Finally, cities are more likely to form relationships with cities that are dissimilar, with higher economic munificence and lower revenue turbulence.

Authors

• Hongtao Yi, The Ohio State University

• Ivy Liu