Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Kurt Weyland is professor of government at the University of Texas, Austin. He is the author of The Politics of Market Reform in Fragile Democracies (Princeton) and Democracy without Equity: Failures of Reform in Brazil.

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"Where do new policy ideas come from? In this important book, Kurt Weyland provides an answer that satisfies both theory and practice; his findings cross disciplinary boundaries with aplomb, insight, and superb analysis of policy decision-making."--Merilee S. Grindle, Harvard University

"This is a very innovative and fruitful work that accounts better than other approaches for the crucial economic policy decisions studied by Weyland."--Guillermo O'Donnell, University of Notre Dame

"This book contains a highly innovative perspective for understanding how policymaking takes place in Latin America. The use of models of bounded rationality, applied to a remarkably vast base of empirical information, provides provocative insights into how particular policies are adopted and how the real elements of rationality that intervene in such adoption are constrained by a series of cognitive factors. This work should become a source of reflection for both national policymakers and the staff of international organizations."--Juan Carlos Navarro, Inter-American Development Bank

"This outstanding book will have a major impact on comparative politics, since it provides a comprehensive defense of the bounded rationality perspective and applies it carefully to explain patterns in the diffusion of pension and health reform in Latin America."--Mitchell Orenstein, Syracuse University

"Well organized and well written, this book makes two broad contributions to our understanding of the diffusion of social sector policies, and more generally to the comparative politics of public policy. First, in a valuable commentary on previous research, it demonstrates convincingly that some of the theories and generalizations in the literature are frequently overstated. Second, and quite originally, it offers an alternative conception of the process of policy choice."--Joan M. Nelson, Princeton University

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Bounded Rationality and Policy Diffusion

Princeton University Press

Chapter One

Why do dissimilar countries adopt similar policy innovations? Why do some new policy models therefore diffuse across regions of the world, spreading like wildfire from the originating nation to countries with different economic, social, or political characteristics? Examples of such striking waves of diffusion abound. The social security system enacted by Otto von Bismarck in Imperial Germany quickly found emulators, first inside Europe, but soon on other continents as well. In this way, a policy scheme designed to pacify a powerful, well-organized, and increasingly militant working class spread to countries where workers constituted a small minority-sometimes noisy, but certainly without much clout. In subsequent decades, the Bismarckian model was imitated by nations at ever lower levels of socioeconomic development, which clearly lacked the domestic needs accounting for its initial adoption in Germany. Why would such different countries enact the same basic model?

Similarly, Ronald Reagan's income tax simplification of 1986 found imitators in countries with very different socioeconomic structures. For instance, Brazil adopted a similar reform in 1988 despite its exceptionally high degree of income inequality, which the reduction of marginal tax rates threatened to exacerbate. Also, since only a small number of middle-and upper-class Brazilians earn enough income to be liable for tax payments, lowering their tax rates jeopardized state revenues. Yet despite the divergent socioeconomic context, Brazil imitated a reform designed for the more developed United States.

Last but not least, the pension privatization enacted by Chile in the early 1980s has spread in Latin America and beyond. Strikingly, even poor countries such as Bolivia and El Salvador have privatized their social security systems although they seem to lack important preconditions for making private pension funds operate successfully. For instance, the formal labor market comprises only a small part of the workforce, severely restricting the coverage of the new social security system. Capital markets may be too underdeveloped to invest affiliates' individual pension funds profitably. And the state's institutional capacities for regulating private pension funds are limited as well. Yet despite the absence of presumed prerequisites for drastic pension reform (WB 1994a: 231, 245, 280; WB IEG 2006: x, xv, xvii, 18-29), these underdeveloped nations followed the lead of the more advanced frontrunner.

The spread of similarity amid diversity that policy diffusion entails raises a puzzle. Why do countries eagerly emulate foreign models that do not seem to fit their own domestic characteristics? Why do they adopt innovations despite lacking crucial prerequisites for making the new policy scheme work (cf. Collier and Messick 1975)? As functional needs cannot account for this rush to imitation, what drives waves of diffusion? Why do so many countries follow the leader, although this herdlike behavior may not be best suited for their specific needs? In short, what causal mechanisms underlie the diffusion of policy innovations across countries?

The present study addresses these important questions by analyzing the spread of pension privatization and health reform in Latin America. The difference between these two issue areas and the variation across the five countries under investigation-Bolivia, Brazil, Costa Rica, El Salvador, and Peru-provide analytical leverage for unearthing the causal mechanisms that drive innovations' spread. Diffusion plays out differently in an area such as social security in which a singular policy model exists, compared to a highly complex field such as health care, where various sources of inspiration exist.

The topic of policy diffusion is of great importance in this era of globalization. Because continuing improvements in communication and transportation intensify the cross-national exchange of information, inspiration from foreign models and principles affects more and more issue areas in more and more countries. As the world grows smaller, policy-making is no longer a domestic affair, but increasingly shaped by external inputs. Nowadays, many decision-makers participate in transnational networks that strongly influence choices at the national level, and they engage in ever denser cooperation and rule making at the international level (Haas 1992; Risse-Kappen 1994; Slaughter 2004). Moreover, a multitude of international organizations seeks to persuade, coax, push, or force governments to adopt policy blueprints or ideas they advocate (Barnett and Finnemore 2004; Pincus and Winters 2002; Vreeland 2003).

Above and beyond this welter of specific exchanges and influences, which often pull in divergent directions (Rosenau 2003), there has been a worldwide advance of liberal economic and political arrangements during the last three decades. The international diffusion of democracy and markets has forged increasing homogeneity as alternative systems such as communism have collapsed and lost adherents (Simmons, Dobbin, and Garrett 2006; Meseguer 2002; Levi-Faur 2005; Domnguez 1998). The range of political choice has shrunk, although scholars continue to debate how narrow it has become; for instance, can Europe's generous welfare states withstand the onslaught of market forces (Pierson 1994; Garrett 1998; Huber and Stephens 2001; Swank 2002; Hall and Soskice 2001; Campbell and Pedersen 2001)?

The present study helps assess how far market mechanisms are likely to advance. Neoliberal principles spread first in the economy yet soon expanded to the social sectors as well, prompting efforts to improve efficiency through increased competition or outright privatization. But in the social sphere, opposition to neoliberalism is particularly strong; many people do not want the profit motive to determine the fulfillment of basic human needs such as health. By analyzing the diffusion of reforms in social security and health care, the current frontiers of the market project, this book examines the strength of the neoliberal wave. Has it already crested and stalled, or is it continuing its advance, extending the logic of competitiveness to ever wider spheres of life? Will society soon be governed by uniform market principles, or do alternative goals and mechanisms, such as social equity and public provision, retain support, puncturing the trend toward global homogeneity and preserving sectoral and national diversity?

Beyond addressing this crucial substantive theme, my study elucidates what is perhaps the major theoretical issue in the social sciences, namely, the question of rationality. Do decisions emerge from the best possible pursuit of clear and firm self-interests, as the rational choice framework postulates, which according to some authors has sought to gain a hegemonic position in political science (Lichbach 2003)? Or does this interest-maximizing scheme offer an unsatisfactory account of political action because actors do not have an effective margin of choice; are not guided by clear, firm interests; or do not pursue such interests in optimal ways? That is, do structural pressures determine decisions and suppress choice? If there is latitude, are actors driven more by other-regarding motives such as appropriateness and legitimacy than by self-interests? Or if interests indeed prevail, do actors lack...