In the best interest of the child: Invention and reinvention in the diffusion of 'modern' adoption policy in the United States

The study of diffusion and adoption of innovations in political science is incomplete and unable to answer the question why do policies diffuse? Additional information should be incorporated into the process. Specifically, rightly defining adoption events that are policy inventions leads to better distinction between major and minor policy changes. Merging two dominant and productive frameworks used for studying policy change-innovation, diffusion and adoption (IDA) framework, and Advocacy Coalition (AC) framework-we can incorporate contextual information more readily into an analysis of policy diffusion. I call this an Invention Based Approach (IBA). With the IBA I explicitly pursue historical events and critical junctures. In this dissertation I gain better understand of an invention event, resulting policy diffusion, and reinvention. I provide descriptive analysis of child adoption policy history in America prior to 1851 and analyze new data to buttress understanding policy invention. I show that conventional wisdom regarding how child adoption policy was created is wrong. I identify and describe important elements of belief for the major and minor coalition factions present at this time. The coalition variables receive limited support in diffusion models. Traditional indicators resource is supported. Other traditional indicators are insignificant which is supportive of the theory presented. Policy reinvention analysis also supports the theory that coalition replacement must occur before major policy change can occur.