Organizations learning from others’ successful policies become more competitive not only because their policies improve but also because they avoid the costs of policy innovation. While latecomer advantage has been widely recognized by economists, the policy diffusion literature in political...

There is a long controversy about the extent to which left and right parties determine the content of public policies, which is mainly limited to analyses of expenditures or policy programmes. As an extension to this work, we assess party effects on other policy outcomes that matter for citizens...