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What Is Policy Convergence and What Causes It?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2009

Abstract

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Review Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1991

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References

1 Kerr, Clark, The Future of Industrial Societies: Convergence or Continuing Diversity? (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 3.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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17 This article stems from previous empirical work in the area of information and communications policy. Prior research has demonstrated a high degree of convergence in the legal remedies established to protect personal data in automated information systems – the policy is normally subsumed under the appellation of ‘data protection’ or ‘information privacy’. The examination of the determinants of this convergence exposed a number of deficiencies in the way that convergence had been conceptualized and explained in previous work. See Bennett, Colin J., ‘Different Processes, One Result: The Convergence of Data Protection Policy in Europe and the United States’, Governance, 1 (1988), 415–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Regulating the Computer: The Politics of Personal Data Protection in Europe and the United States (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, forthcoming).

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63 Although there is now a burgeoning literature which applies state-centred approaches to many cases, the central theoretical works remain Evans, Peter B., Rueschemeyer, Dietrich and Skocpol, Theda, eds, Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Nordlinger, Eric A., On the Autonomy of the Democratic State (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981).Google Scholar Useful reviews are found in: Krasner, Stephen D., ‘Approaches to the State: Alternative Conceptions and Historical Dynamics’, Comparative Politics, 16 (1984), 223–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Almond, Gabriel A., ‘The Return to the State’, American Political Science Review, 82 (1988), 853901.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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