Replication Data for: Ideology, Learning, and Policy Diffusion: Experimental Evidence

We introduce experimental research design to the study of policy diffusion in order to better understand how political ideology affects policymakers’ willingness to learn from one another’s experiences. Our two experiments, embedded in national surveys of U.S. municipal officials, expose local policymakers to vignettes describing the zoning and home foreclosure policies of other cities, offering opportunities to learn more. We find that: (1) policymakers who are ideologically predisposed against the described policy are relatively unwilling to learn from others, but (2) such ideological biases can be overcome with an emphasis on the policy’s success or on its adoption by co-partisans in other communities. We also find a similar partisan-based bias among traditional ideological supporters, who are less willing to learn from those in the opposing party. The experimental approach offered here provides numerous new opportunities for scholars of policy diffusion.我们将实验研究设计引入政策扩散（policy diffusion）研究领域，旨在更深入地剖析政治意识形态如何影响政策制定者相互借鉴经验的意愿。我们的两项实验嵌入于针对美国市政官员的全国性调查之中，向地方政策制定者呈现描述其他城市分区政策与住房止赎政策的情景描述（vignettes），为其提供了进一步了解相关政策的契机。研究发现：其一，意识形态上抵触所描述政策的政策制定者，相对更不愿向他人学习；其二，若突出政策的实施成效，或是该政策被其他社群内同党人士所采纳，则可有效破除此类意识形态偏见。此外，我们还在传统意识形态支持者群体中发现了类似的党派偏见——这类群体更不愿向对立党派的政策制定者学习。本文所提出的实验研究路径，为政策扩散领域的学者提供了诸多全新的研究机遇。