1 Improving the Likelihood of Effective Policy Outcomes: A Theory of Policy Diffusion Program Evaluation

We present an individual-level theory which explains how decision-making during the policy adoption process allows policy scholars to understand the likelihood of effective policy outcomes. Unlike other theories of the policy process, we contend that when policy diffusion occurs it is possible to identify the likelihood of effectiveness by examining the causal reasoning that resulted in the diffusion of the policy. We expand upon Oxley and Stoutenborough’s (2012) analogy heuristic to identify ways in which policy actors may mistakenly use invalid causal reasoning during situations of policy diffusion, and how this will influence policy effectiveness. We follow the theoretical development with an empirical test of the effectiveness of state renewable energy policies on the construction of wind energy. The results indicate that several of the policies that were diffused relied upon a valid causal structure, while others may not have been as fortunate. 3 Policy scholarship has grown increasingly sophisticated in the last three decades. As policy studies moved from the general approaches of Lasswell (1956) and Cohen, March and Olson (1972) to the more sophisticated theories of Mazmanian and Sabatier (1981, 1983), Baumgartner and Jones (1993), and Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith (1988), our understanding of the policy process has mad