To date, many analyses of national policies treat those policies as evolving out of the distinctive needs, conflicts, and histories of national societies. Over the past two decades, sociological theorists have moved towards an emphasis on the economic interdependency of states and the functioning of states as part of a world system. In this context, diffusion processes, that is, the transmission of policies across social actors, can be seen as central to the way national policy making is constrained and informed by a larger social, political, and cultural environment. This proposal will use event-history analyses of national policies in environmental protection to investigate the world-wide adoption of national policies. These models will permit the estimation of effects related to the susceptibility of the potential adopter to external influences, the infectiousness of external sources of diffusion, and the social proximity of the potential adopter to the source of diffusion. This project will contribute to our understanding of the timing of the adoption of national policies based on understandings of (1) the ways that relationships among nation- states as well as internal forces speed or retard diffusion of policies, (2) the ways that international organizations help produce similar policies, and (3) the ways that the timing and characteristics of policies affect the rates of diffusion. This project will make an important social scientific contribution to our understanding of the human dimensions of global environmental change, and it should provide us with new insights into the potential uses and limitations of event-history analyses.
