Affiliation:
1. Southern Utah University, Cedar City, UT, USA
2. Boise State University, Boise, ID, USA
Abstract
This study examines whether and how policy entrepreneurs and their interactions with state legislatures influence the adoption and diffusion of a child abuse prevention policy, that is, Erin’s Law, across U.S. state legislatures. Employing 8 years of state-level data (2011–2018), we claim that a policy entrepreneur’s impact on policy adoption is conditional on the degree of legislative professionalism and the state’s political ideology. The event history analysis (EHA) and logistic regression (Logit) analyses reveal that policy entrepreneurs’ speaking engagements decrease the time to adoption and increase the likelihood of adoption, and the effect becomes stronger when states’ political ideology aligns with the political landscape surrounding the issue. However, our findings did not support the countervailing role of a policy entrepreneur in leveling gaps in the degree of legislative professionalism and ideological preferences across state legislatures.
Subject
Political Science and International Relations,Public Administration