Policy Laboratories of the Federal State?

An often-stated advantage of federalist over unitarian states is that decentralized states serve as policy laboratories in which new policies are tested and - if successful - spread to the entire country. It implicitly assumes that federalism promotes policy learning. However, how do policies diffuse? Through which channels are policy relevant information disseminated? To address these questions, empirically, this book analyzes how interdependencies between policy-makers in the federal state of Switzerland influence health policy choices. More precisely, it focuses on governmental subsidies for health insurance premiums, the main social corrective to the otherwise strongly liberal system. Adapting a diffusion framework and using an innovative method, this research provides evidence that policy-makers learn from the experiences of others. Indeed, successful policies do not just spread - rather, they need to be channeled. By facilitating the exchange among policy-makers, institutionalized intergovernmental cooperation is identified as one possible channel for policy diffusion and policy learning. Such institutions are therefore crucial for the states-as-laboratories metaphor to work.