Failures : Diffusion, Learning, and Policy Abandonment

Studies of the diffusion of policies and institutions tend to focus on innovations that successfully spread across governments. Implicit in such diffusion is the abandonment of the previous policy or institution. This paper focuses directly on the abandonment of welfare policies under the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program across the fifty U.S. states from 1997 through 2002. Using a dyad-based event history analysis, I find that, if both states in a pairing have a policy and one state's policy fails (in employing welfare recipients, reducing rolls, or reducing poverty), then the other state is much more likely to abandon that failing policy. Moreover, such learning from the other state's experience is more common when the states are ideologically similar to one another and when the legislature in the potentially learning state is more professional