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Why do some policy innovations difuse while others fizzle? The contemporary policy diffusion literature is based on conclusions from the study of successful attempts at diffusion, but there is good reason to suspect that this leaves our theorizing open to selection bias. I introduce the concept of blocking coalitions, networks of actors that mobilize across governments to stop policies that threaten their interests from diffusing, to explain variation. To identify the effect that such coalitions can play, I study instances of failed or stalled diffusion. In particular, I use the anomalous case of state-level policing reform in the United States in the early twentieth century to demonstrate how such coalitions arise and how they can be effective at stalling or blocking diffusion. Using a multi-method research design, I establish that entrenched interests--especially Northern labor unions and rural Southern white elites--combined to block the spread of statewide police forces, a case that current diffusion theorizing says should have successfully established itself throughout the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does resource wealth affect the policies autocracies choose? We propose a new theory of how selectorates influence non-distributive policy choices. Taxation requires compliance, giving the public limited policy influence even in authoritarian regimes. Increased resource rents makes government less reliant on taxes and thus less responsive to the public. Yet regimes will still be responsive to selectorates and their policy demands. This theory explains how \petroleum perpetuates patriarchy" more successfully than Ross (2008, 2012). Using Ross's data, we demonstrate that the association between oil income and reduced female empowerment is present only in autocracies (especially monarchies), that the relationship is strongest when oil rents are highest, and that the relation- ship holds even when we lag explanatory variables by forty years. We also show that oil income is associated with outcomes that are consistent with our theory but unexplained by his, such as increased adolescent and total fertility and decreased alcohol consumption, tobacco use, and contraceptive availability. These outcomes are plausibly linked to values espoused by Islamic actors. We use qualitative evidence to demonstrate that our supply-side theory is more powerful in cases crucial to Ross's findings. Petroleum may perpetuate patriarchy, but only when influential members of the selectorate insist it should. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why are issues linked in international negotiations? I propose one mechanism by which executives can use agenda control to their advantage by both forcing and blocking linkage in international negotiations. I demonstrate that the negotiator's position in a structurally divided government allows him to shape international negotiations to the negotiator's benefit even without the use of side payments. Developing insights from a spatial model, I examine case studies drawn from U.S. issue linkage and non-linkage from the Nixon administration to demonstrate the theory's plausibility. I also reanalyze the case of the Anglo-Japanese alliance as presented in Davis (2009) to demonstrate the model's applicability to other settings and my model's greater ability to explain the emergence of issue linkage than existing approaches. I conclude that the importance of executive autonomy from the legislaturemay lie not in the ability to force linkage but to resist it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the role of blocking coalition in influencing debates among policy makers. It examines the role of pro-innovation policy entrepreneurs in shaping policy diffusion and in spreading policy ideas from one state to another. It also discusses the generation of contrary pressure that mobilize interest groups to reshape or block policy innovations.

Largely overlooked by historians and political scientists alike, the formation of state police agencies throughout the United States (largely in the interwar period) has been too often characterized as a simple response to increases in criminality or to specific challenges posed by technological and economic change. But a careful review of the scant existing literature and new archival and quantitative data from the case of the Indiana State Police demonstrate instead that the creation of state policing agencies was the result of much more complicated processes involving rethinking the relation of law enforcement to democratic values and overcoming resistance among labor leaders who feared (not without reason) that the new agencies would be simple tools of management repression. The continuing variety in major state policing agencies (including limits to their jurisdiction and deployments) can be traced back to the state-by-state resolution of these debates. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]