Policy Attributes, Legislative Entrepreneurs, and Agenda Setting in the Diffusion of Innovations

While the diffusion of policy innovations has been studied extensively at the enactment stage, relatively less attention has been paid to the earlier stages of the process (Karch 2007). In particular, we know relatively little about factors that influence the agenda-setting stage, in which the actions of individual “legislative entrepreneurs” (Mintrom 1997; Wawro 2000) are more important than the institutional, political, and spatial factors that are highly relevant at the enactment stage. In this paper, I argue that patterns in legislative entrepreneurship should be influenced by political and institutional factors, such as expertise and electoral self-interest, but also by five policy attributes, the characteristics associated with Everett Rogers’ typology of innovation attributes. I examine patterns of bill sponsorship across 45 state legislatures in the area of criminal justice policy, looking at innovative policies adopted and considered between 1993 and 2004. I find that policy attributes do not directly influence the likelihood of legislative entrepreneurship, but that policy attributes condition the relationship between legislative specialization and entrepreneurship