Policy Into Practice: Explaining the Diffusion of Policy Content and Implementation across the U.S. StatesSmith, Kelly BranhamcreatorMoffitt, SusanAdvisorSchiller, WendyReaderWong, KennethReaderManna, PaulReaderBrown University. Department of Political Sciencesponsor2017ix, 257 p.born digitalThesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2017thesesIn the 1932 Justice Brandeis wrote, “It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single courageous State may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory.” Since then, scholars have treated states as democratic laboratories by studying how policy learning can structure the spread of policies from one government to another. Because diffusion scholars focus on a discrete moment-the moment of adoption-they assume that learning occurs during adoption and that elected policymakers are the only actors engaging in learning. However, states may also implement policies after they are adopted. This dissertation is guided by two questions. First, do states implement the same policies differently and, if so, how do those differences bear on subsequent adoptions? Second, how are bureaucrats participating in this process? These two research questions lie at the heart of a larger puzzle: If bureaucrats are driving diffusion and diffusion is the primary way in which states act as democratic laboratories, are states operating as democratic laboratories? I change the study of diffusion by arguing that bureaucrats also participate in policy learning and, thus, are crucial to the diffusion process. Bureaucrats can learn from other states’ policy adoption and implementation to affect policymaking within their state. I evaluate my argument with an original twenty-year, fifty state dataset of state pre-kindergarten policies. This dataset includes state political, demographic, and bureaucratic variables gathered from the U.S. Census, National Center for Education Statistics, National Institute for Early Education Research as well as other sources. I find that out-of state implementation affects whether states adopt a diffusing policy and out-of-state adoption affects the implementation of similar policies across states. I also find that bureaucrats develop their early learning standards by learning from other states. The speed with which a state can develop these standards affects the adoption of policy and adopting these standards influences the implementation of policy. My findings imply that states have served as the democratic laboratories that Justice Brandeis described. However, states are also operating as laboratories of bureaucracy. Political sciencepolicyEnglishRPB2017061610.7301/Z0F76B1CIn CopyrightAll rights reserved. Collection is open to the Brown community for research.dissertations