Learning From Comparative Public Policy

A Practical Guide

Richard Rose

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134371105
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica

This textbook offers a fresh approach to the study of comparative politics and public policy. Instead of concentrating on why countries differ, Learning From Comparative Public Policy explores how countries can learn from each other about the success and failure of policy initiatives. With its theory and practice focus, the lively narrative analyzes the cultural and resources problems involved in importing policies, and the roles of institutions, regulators, think tanks and experts.In addition to explaining the key tenets of policy analysis, the internationally renowned author offers a wide variety of international case studies and useful boxes to highlight examples. Invaluable reading for students of public policy, for policy makers and practitioners working in the public sector, it includes: * learning from comparison
* defining a problem and creating awareness
* where to look for lessons
* applying the policy model
* the problems of importing models
* using terms to evaluate future consequences.

Stage III

Returning home

Step 6

Drawing a lesson

DOI: 10.4324/9780203585108-10

Design is the core of all professional training; it is the principal mark that distinguishes the professions from the sciences.

Herbert Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial

A model of a foreign programme is the starting, not the end, point of lesson-drawing. The object is to put foreign experience to use by applying at home what you have learned abroad. With a model in hand, the design of a new programme does not start from scratch. Instead of a blank sheet of paper on which to record speculations, there is an outline of how a programme produces a given result elsewhere. The object is not to photocopy that programme, but to make use of what you have learned abroad to create a programme that can be put into effect here.

Programmes are designed rather than given, and design is an art requiring skill and judgement. Designing a new programme is not like assembling a model aeroplane by carefully following every step in a diagram. A public programme has both ‘hardware’ features that are relatively easy to transfer because they are independent of place, such as methods for inoculating people against a new disease, and ‘software’ features that affect the implementation of a programme, such as methods that encourage people to come forward for inoculation (Rogers, 1995: 14).

As Herbert Simon emphasizes, design is a professional skill that differs from the scientist's concern with knowledge for its own sake. Professional education is about applying knowledge as well as about understanding basic principles. The latter can be learned in a seminar while the former is learned on the job. Professionals demonstrate their skills by diagnosing a particular problem and making recommendations for action. A civil engineer builds a bridge by combining scientific knowledge about stresses in metal structures and on-site test bores of a particular river bed and its banks. Policymaking is a profession, too. However, the large number of uncertainties in politics requires more judgement or guesswork than does the design of a bridge or an office building.

Lessons drawn from failure are easy to apply, because they can be stated as maxims about what you should not do. For example, a study of why a foreign government failed to cope with a flood may conclude: there were inadequate safeguards to guard against infrequent yet heavy torrents of rain; flood protection facilities were not properly maintained and inspected; and emergency police and fire services were not trained to put up emergency flood barriers. While these lessons appear obvious, they nonetheless remain important, and the example of foreign failure makes them more immediately convincing as stimuli for action. The limitation of drawing lessons from the failure of others is that it usually does not offer positive instruction about what should be done.

Learning lessons from successful programmes is more appealing but also more difficult, because a positive lesson must specify in detail how a model based on a programme elsewhere can be applied here. The first section of this chapter discusses a variety of ways in which lessons can be drawn, ranging from photocopying another country's programme through making a synthesis from two programmes, to using foreign examples for disciplined inspiration or selective imitation. The second section shows the need to be flexible in applying a model by examining the process of lesson-drawing within the European Union. The goal of the EU is to increase the integration of programmes between member states, but the European Commission in Brussels does not have the political authority to impose uniform programmes. Instead, it encourages member states to harmonize their programmes. The musical analogy is apt, for programmes can be harmonized by a variety of instruments.

Applying a model

Lesson-drawing is like reverse engineering, a procedure that manufacturers use when they want to copy a successful product created by a competitor. Reverse engineering involves taking apart a competitor's product in order to find out how it works and adapting it so that it can be marketed as one's own. When a new and popular computer device comes on the market, for example, competitors buy it in order to find out how it works. This knowledge is summarized in a model. The next step is to design a product that the second manufacturer can produce. Because of patent and copyright law, the resulting product cannot be an exact copy of another's product. Yet alterations cannot be introduced arbitrarily; otherwise, the newly designed product may not work as intended or may lack sales appeal. The speed with which a new product is matched by ‘copycat’ products from competitors is evidence of rapid learning by firms marketing everything from computers to clothes.

Applying a model of a public programme is both easier and harder than the reverse engineering of fashion goods or a new electronic device. It is easier because public programmes are not copyrighted, and policymakers will regard it as giving them prestige if other countries want to copy what they do. Moreover, the model abstracted from another government is usually fairly general; it therefore allows wide scope for choice when it comes to filling in the details of the programme based on it. For example, a model of free elections can leave open whether a national parliament is elected by proportional representation or by the Anglo-American first-past-the-post method. Yet the openness of a programme model creates difficulties insofar as it leaves out many practical details. Confronted with a foreign prototype, national policymakers are forced to find institutions in their own country that are functionally equivalent to those in the country of origin.

The extent to which policymakers stay close to the original when drawing a lesson is a matter of constitutional frameworks and political power. In a unitary state the discretion of local and regional authorities is much more limited than in a federal system, for a department in the national capital can impose a ‘cookie cutter’ model that stamps out virtually the same programme in every town hall. However, a national government cannot have a programme from another country imposed on it, as is often the fate of local government. Furthermore, when policymakers are under pressure to act, there is a wide choice of alternative programmes from which to draw lessons. The practical issue in lesson-drawing is whether the design of a programme draws on a single foreign example or a combination of foreign examples (Box 6.1).

Box 6.1 Alternative ways of drawing a lesson

• Photocopying	Producing an exact photocopy with a minimum of change in the names of institutions and places and dates.
• Copying	Duplicating almost all the elements of a programme already in effect in another place.
• Adaptation	Altering details of the design of a programme elsewhere without removing major elements.
• Hybrid	Combining elements of programmes with the same objective in different jurisdictions.
• Synthesis	Combining in a novel way familiar elements of programmes with the same objective.
• Disciplined inspiration	Responding to the stimulus of a programme's else-inspiration where by creating a novel programme not inconsistent with foreign examples.
• Selective imitation	Adopting attractive, but not necessarily essential, imitation parts of other programmes while leaving out awkward but essential bits.

Single examples

A programme is a photocopy of what is done elsewhere if the only differences between the original and the new measure are due to crossing out a few place names and dates specific to the original and inserting new ones. In a centralized state, the national government can lay down uniform standards that local governments must comply with in order to avoid challenge in the courts. For example, the administration of parliamentary elections is in the hands of British local authorities, but the rules governing election administration are laid down in Whitehall by central government. In such a situation, most modifications of the central programme are limited to filling in blanks with local addresses of the places where votes can be cast on election day.

Yet just as a poem translated from English into French or German cannot be the same as the original, so a programme that is translated from one country to another cannot be exactly the same. Even if the original source and the lesson drawn are both in English, that does not make the two programmes identical; the political institutions of Britain are not the same as the United States, nor are the federal institutions of Canada the same as those of the United States or Australia. However, the translation of a programme ought to be faithful to the original from which it is drawn.

Copying a programme by duplicating the great majority of its features establishes a single programme as a prototype while allowing for variation in minor details in order to allow for differences in context and in preferences of those doing the copying. Within a country copying is facilitated by a common framework of national laws and institutions. In federal systems copying a prototype recognizes that state and local authorities have a degree of discretion that is denied when a central design must be photocopied. In the United States the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws drafts model legislation for programmes ranging from alcoholism to unclaimed property. Its efforts have led dozens of American states to copy more than 100 model laws in such fields as the commercial code and family law (Council of State Governments, 1990: 405ff.).

Copying is more difficult across national boundaries. In academic theories, national governments can be treated as no more than intervening variables in the globalization of health, education, and other social welfare programmes. But when programmes are moved across national boundaries, it is necessary to make alterations to take into account differences in language, legal procedures, institutions, and resources. If the political rationale is strong, a programme can be copied with very few modifications. For example, the electoral system enacted by the British government for use in Northern Ireland elections is the single transferable vote system copied from the Irish Republic rather than the standard British system.

Whereas a model is created by removing details of how a programme operates in the country of origin, applying a model across national boundaries requires the insertion of details about laws, institutions, and administrative procedures. Adaptation involves two governments in the one-to-one relationship of a leader and a follower. For example, the collapse of the Communist government of East Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 voided many of its Soviet-inspired programmes. The integration of the five East German Länder into the Federal Republic of Germany created a new constitutional framework within which East German Länder could adapt programmes consistent with federal legislation already in effect in West Germany (cf. Pickel, 1997; Jacoby, 2000).

One lesson with multiple sources

If two or more foreign programmes are observed, then a lesson can be drawn that is a hybrid, combining compatible elements of several programmes. All the elements of a hybrid programme can be observed in action, albeit in different places. When the Federal Republic of Germany was debating its electoral system, there were disputes between those who argued for choosing members of parliament by proportional representation, the normal practice of most continental European countries, and proponents of the Anglo-American first-past-the-post system. The upshot was a hybrid electoral system, in which half the members of the German Bundestag are elected by proportional representation and half by a first-past-the-post ballot. Forty years later, when post-Communist countries of Eastern Europe were choosing an electoral system, several adapted the German hybrid.

A lesson can be a synthesis if it combines elements from similar programmes in different countries in a distinctive way or if it combines foreign examples with elements of its existing domestic programmes. While the electoral system of a new democracy may be a unique synthesis of elements, each of its parts can usually be found in other free and fair electoral systems. When the need arose in post-Communist Europe to produce electoral laws fast, policymakers did not try to innovate. Instead, new laws synthesized elements from programmes in place in other countries. At times, elements were retained from the Communist past, for example, the requirement of at least a minimum turnout to make an election valid. A synthesis is particularly likely to emerge as the compromise outcome of a detailed process of bargaining. For example, the Hungarian electoral system is a synthesis. It mixes proportional representation and single-member districts in a manner adapted from Germany; it allocates proportional representation seats at two tiers along Scandinavian lines; and some members of parliament are elected from single-member districts with provision for two rounds of competition, as in France.

Foreign travel can open the eyes of policymakers to the fact that their own way of dealing with a problem is not the only way. When a foreign example appears more successful, it can inspire fresh thoughts. Senior politicians can return from a trip abroad or, in one British case, from a trip to the dentist inspired by what they have learned from a chance encounter. The task of investigating whether an attractive idea can be implemented is then delegated to expert officials, and the mode of lesson-drawing shifts from inspiration to perspiration. This is likely to require adding major elements that are different from the original source of inspiration. Yet since such a lesson will still have elements found in programmes elsewhere, it is not purely speculative. The outcome can be described as a work of disciplined inspiration, in which the original model, based on foreign examples, is the starting point for a series of modifications that go beyond simple adaptation.

Without the discipline of a model, attempts at lesson-drawing are no better than selective imitation. Imitation is selective when a lesson concentrates on those parts of a foreign programme that are congenial to policymakers while leaving out the hard parts that impose political costs. In such instances, policymakers do not want a model showing in detail how a foreign programme works; instead, they will ‘cherry-pick’ a few features of a programme that are appealing and incorporate these in a programme that is designed independently of foreign examples. When a foreign programme is associated with success, then imitating a few prominent features can also be used to legitimate what national policymakers design for their own purposes. For example, in the 1980s the privatization of public enterprises and assets became politically attractive to many governments. However, crossnational differences in political interests meant that some policymakers did not engage in systematic study of leading examples from Thatcher's Britain and Reagan's American programmes. Instead, they relied more ‘on anecdote rather than evidence, a sign that legitimation rather than learning may be the motivating force’ (Henig et al., 1988: 459).

Applying lessons in the European Union

The European Union is distinctive in having substantial political resources to encourage lesson-drawing as part...