One of the key issues of globalisation research in the social sciences is the question of whether globalisation leads to the convergence of political institutions, policies, the legal order and societal structures (Guillén 2001: 235). Is the world becoming ever more similar as a result of globalisation and Europeanisation as the ‘world society approach’ (Meyer et al. 1997) implies? Does the strong growth of economic and institutional interlinkages between nation states lead to increasingly similar policy measures across countries? Or is the search for convergence emerging from the domestic impact of globalisation and European integration ‘an impossible quest’ (Dimitrova and Steunenberg 2000: 201), because domestic responses to global or European challenges are strongly influenced by existing domestic structures and institutions (see, for example, Cowles, Caporaso and Risse 2001; Héritier et al. 2001; Knill 2001)?

Although there has been an intensified and renewed debate on the convergence and divergence of national policies in recent years, we still have a limited understanding of the phenomenon of policy convergence.