2023/03/21 by Katrina Fundytus, Cristina Santamaria-Plaza, Lindsay McLaren
Business, Management and Accounting · Health Professions · Medicine · Social Sciences · #Conceptualization #Context (archaeology) #Economics #Global Public Health Policies and Epidemiology #Government (linguistics) #Health Policy Implementation Science #Health policy #Law #Medicine #Policy Transfer and Learning #Policy studies #Political science #Public economics #Public health #Public policy #Public relations #Scholarship
paper · pdf · doi:10.17269/s41997-023-00752-x
crossref issued 2023/03/21 · crossref published 2023/03/21 · crossref published-online 2023/03/21 · openalex publication_date 2023/03/21 · crossref created 2023/03/21 · crossref deposited 2023/05/03 · crossref published-print 2023/06/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · crossref indexed 2026/07/28 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06
OBJECTIVES: Our aim was to synthesize published scholarship that applies policy diffusion-a theory of the policy process that considers the interdependence of government-level public health policy choices. We paid particular attention to the role of scientific evidence in the diffusion process, and to identifying challenges and gaps towards strengthening the intersection of public health, public policy, and political science. METHODS: We systematically searched 17 electronic academic databases. We included English-language, peer-reviewed articles published between 2000 and 2021. For each article, we extracted the following information: public health policy domain, geographic setting, diffusion directions and mechanisms, the role of scientific evidence in the diffusion process, and author research discipline. SYNTHESIS: We identified 39 peer-reviewed, primary research articles. Anti-smoking and tobacco control policies in the United States (n = 9/39) were the most common policy domain and geographic context examined; comparatively fewer studies examined policy diffusion in the Canadian context (n = 4/39). In terms of how policies diffuse, we found evidence of five diffusion mechanisms (learning, emulation, competition, coercion, and social contagion), which could moreover be conditional on internal government characteristics. The role of scientific evidence in the diffusion process was unclear, as only five articles discussed this. Policy diffusion theory was primarily used by public policy and political science scholars (n = 19/39), with comparatively fewer interdisciplinary authorship teams (n = 6/39). CONCLUSION: Policy diffusion theory provides important insights into the intergovernmental factors that influence public health policy decisions, thus helping to expand our conceptualization of evidence-informed public health. Despite this, policy diffusion research in the Canadian public health context is limited.