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Studies of the diffusion of policies tend to focus on innovations that successfully spread across governments. Implicit in such diffusion is the abandonment of the previous policy. Yet little is known about whether governments abandon policies that have failed elsewhere, as would be consistent with states acting as policy laboratories not only for policy successes but also for failures. This article focuses on the possible abandonment of failing welfare-to-work policies in the formative years (1997–2002) of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program across the 50 U.S. states. Using a dyad-based event history analysis, I find that, if both states in a pairing have a policy and one state's policy fails (in employing welfare recipients, reducing welfare rolls, or reducing overall poverty rates), then the other state is much more likely to abandon that failing policy. Moreover, such learning from the other state's experience is more common when the states are ideologically similar to one another and when the legislature in the potentially learning state is more professional.

This article illustrates the use of the directed dyad‐year event history analysis to study policy diffusion, with an application to policy changes in the Children's Health Insurance Program from 1998 to 2001. This analysis reveals strong evidence that states with successful policies are more likely to be emulated than are those with failing policies. Evidence of success is especially relevant for policy changes that lower program costs rather than those raising costs, and for changes made by legislatures rather than by administrative agencies. Moreover, this study reveals policy diffusion based on political, demographic, and budgetary similarities across states, rather than simply geographic proximity.

This article calls upon the social scientific research community to systematically assess policy devolution within American federalism through the lens of welfare reform. It asks specifically whether the benefits of policy devolution in this area-the opportunity to learn from policy experiments in similar states and the ability to tailor policies to individual state circumstances-outweigh the costs of devolution-possible racial biases across the states, incentives for cutting costs, and fears of a race to the bottom in benefits and eligibility criteria. A scientific research agenda for addressing these issues is developed. The contribution of is assessed in terms of its advancement of this agenda. A path toward future contributions to this agenda is suggested. References. Adapted from the source document.