Policy diffusion in multi-level political systems: How political innovations spread across hierarchical jurisdictions

This article is a systematic analytical review of studies analyzing the patterns of policy innovation diffusion in multilevel political systems and the main mechanisms of policy diffusion between hierarchical jurisdictions. Particular attention is paid to the changing effects of policy innovation diffusion in the context of the transformation of the contemporary field of political science and the shift of researchers’ attention to multilevel governance systems involving non-traditional actors. The paper provides an overview of two main approaches to the theoretical conceptualization of the process of policy diffusion – policy diffusion and policy transfer. The first part of the study examines the evolution of these theoretical models and the main mechanisms of diffusion that correspond to them. The second part of the study identifies the key determinants of policy diffusion – structural, institutional and agency characteristics, and describes the main causal mechanisms of these determinants. Special attention is paid to the phenomenon of vertical diffusion of policy innovations. The final part of the article is devoted to the comparison of policy diffusion models in Western and non-Western political contexts on the example of a comparative analysis of the policy diffusion in multilevel political systems of China and the United States.

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