Intergovernmental grants are based on the interrelated choices of: (i) the national government deciding whether to offer the grant; (ii) the national government determining grant conditions; (iii) the subnational government deciding whether to accept the grant; and (iv) the subnational...

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...

We introduce experimental research design to the study of policy diffusion in order to better understand the role of political ideology in policymakers’ willingness to learn from one another’s experiences. Our two experiments, embedded in national surveys of U.S. municipal officials, expose...