The Globalization of Liberalization: Policy Diffusion in the International Political Economy

One of the most important developments over the past three decades has been the spread of liberal economic ideas and policies throughout the world. These policies have affected the lives of millions of people, yet our most sophisticated political economy models do not adequately capture influences on these policy choices. Evidence suggests that the adoption of liberal economic practices is highly clustered both temporally and spatially. We hypothesize that this clustering might be due to processes of policy diffusion. We think of diffusion as resulting from one of two broad sets of forces: one in which mounting adoptions of a policy alter the benefits of adopting for others and another in which adoptions…

• CF
  Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University
• CF
  Center for Advanced Study, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign