Political Science Professor Awarded National Science Foundation Grant to Study Public Policy Diffusion

Jason Windett, Ph.D., assistant professor of political science, will serve as a principal investigator (PI) on a grant that was awarded $808,129 over three years, with $89,679 coming to Saint Louis University.

The award is through National Science Foundation's Resource Implementations for Data Intensive Research program - the Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences.

The project, titled “DAPPR: Diffusion Analytics for Public Policy Research,” is a collaborative effort with Fred Boemke (University of Iowa), Bruce Desmarais (Pennsylvania State University), Jeffrey Harden (University of Notre Dame), William Franko (West Virginia University), Robert McGrath (George Mason University), and Yu-Ru Lin (University of Pittsburgh).

The diffusion of laws and regulations across political boundaries can reduce the tension between innovation and consistency. Policy diffusion – the process by which policies, rules or decisions made in one state flow to others – has been a topic of focus across the social sciences for several decades, but due to limitations of data and computational capacity, researchers have not taken a comprehensive and data-intensive look at cross-policy patterns of diffusion. The team is utilizing cutting-edge methods of text and network analysis to understand how policies, as represented in digitized text, spread through networks connecting the American states. The PIs are developing both data and computational methods that address the most pressing limitations to the study of policy diffusion networks.

The goals of this project are two-fold. The first is to provide a comprehensive suite of data and tools to facilitate the scientific study of policy diffusion. The second is to advance methodology for studying diffusion networks more generally. Historically, researchers have examined policy diffusion one policy at a time rather than in a comprehensive fashion. This approach is primarily due to the lack of available data on multiple policies and the absence of methodological tools for analyzing multiple policies at once. The research team proposes to solve both of these problems. By advancing policy-diffusion methods, they will offer broad methodological contributions to the study of diffusion that will be applicable throughout the social sciences.

All of our data and findings will be shared on a user-friendly website. This website will allow citizens, elected officials and members of the media to access and learn from our study as they construct new policies or report on the policymaking process."

Jason Windett, Ph.D.

"Policy diffusion is often seen as a learning process by which states try new innovative approaches to a policy problem, and other states follow based on the success or failures in the prior states," Windett said. "The grant will allow us to extend how we view policy diffusion processes from single issues, or a few issues to a framework examining hundreds of issue areas. The new techniques and data will allow for a far more insightful analysis of diffusion networks than previously examined."

Windett’s work will explore policy diffusion in the context of state courts. His team will examine both horizontal and vertical diffusion networks by tracking state courts of last resort citations within a state, to other state courts of last resort, as well as federal district, courts of appeals, and the U.S. Supreme Court.

"Our research will be broadly appealing to individuals outside academia, as all of our data and findings will be shared on a user-friendly website," Windett said. "The website will provide graphical, geographical and simple tabular analyses from our work, as well as metrics identifying innovative states and branches of government. This website will allow citizens, elected officials and members of the media to access and learn from our study as they construct new policies or report on the policymaking process."

This is Windett’s second National Science Foundation award.