Title:      Potential Ambiguities in a Directed Dyad Approach to State
Policy Emulation 

Authors:    Frederick  Boehmke

Entrydate:  2007-07-10 17:00:20

Keywords:   state politics, state policy, diffusion, emulation, monte
carlo, health policy, dyadic

Abstract:   In this paper I discuss circumstances under which the
dyadic model of
policy diffusion can produce misleading estimates in favor of policy
emulation. 
These circumstances arise in the context of state pain management
policy, 
and correspond generally to policies that states are uniformly
expanding. 
When this happens, dyadic models of policy diffusion
conflate policy emulation and policy adoption: since early adopters
are 
policy leaders, later adopters will appear to emulate them, even if
they
are merely stragglers acting on their own accord. I demonstrate the
possibility
of this ambiguity analytically and through Monte Carlo simulation.
Both start with the assumption that the data are generated according
to a standard, monadic 
model of policy adoption and then converted to a dyadic model, which
can
incorrectly produce evidence of emulation. I propose a simple
modification
of the dyadic emulation model --- conditioning on the opportunity to
emulate --- 
and show that it is much less likely to produce inaccurate findings.
I then return to the study of pain management policy and find
substantial 
differences between the dyadic emulation model and the conditional
emulation
model.

http://polmeth.wustl.edu/retrieve.php?id=699