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Despite theoretical and methodological progress in what is now coined as the third generation of diffusion studies, explicitly dealing with the causal mechanisms underlying diffusion processes and comparatively analyzing them is only of recent date. As a matter of fact, diffusion research has ended up in a diverse and often unconnected array of theoretical assumptions relying both on rational as well as constructivist reasoning – a circumstance calling for more theoretical coherence and consistency. Against this backdrop, this paper reviews and streamlines diffusion literature in political science. Diffusion mechanisms largely cluster around two causal arguments determining the desires and preferences of actors for choosing alternative policies. First, existing diffusion mechanisms accounts can be grouped according to the rationality for policy adoption, this means that government behavior is based on the instrumental considerations of actors or on constructivist arguments like norms and rule-driven actors. Second, diffusion mechanisms can either directly impact on the beliefs of actors or they might influence the structural conditions for decision-making. Following this logic, four basic diffusion mechanisms can be identified in mechanism-based thinking on policy diffusion: emulation, socialization, learning, and externalities.

Zu den Beiträgen des Themenhefts. Die in dem Themenheft versammelten Beiträge setzen sich unter verschiedenen Fragestellungen, im Rahmen unterschiedlicher methodischer Ansätze und jeweils eigener Datensets mit Öffentlichkeit, Privatheit und Anonymität im kommunikativen Handeln mit mobilen Medien auseinander.

We are interested in how children organize joint pretend play. In this kind of play, children create an invented world by transforming matters of the real world into matters of a fictional world (e.g., pretending to be a 'giant' or treating a particular spatial area as a 'witch's kitchen'). Since there are no rules and no script, every next step in the game is an improvisation designed here and now. Children engaged in free play have equal rights to determine what should happen next. For that reason, they have to negotiate next steps. We are interested in a particular expression that children often use in joint play: aus Spaß/Spiel ('for fun' or 'for play', similar to 'let's pretend'). Based on a corpus of five hours of video recordings of two pairs of twins (the younger children are between 3 and 5 years old, the older ones are 8 years old), we show that children regularly use aus Spiel while playing as a method for shaping the activity. Inventing new events, children try to get their co-players to accept them and act accordingly. In that context, issues of (dis-)alignment and deontic rights become relevant. Here, we are interested in the interactional work that aus Spiel-('let's pretend')-turns do and how co-players respond.

The thesis ”A Tale of Many Stories - Explaining Policy Diffusion between European Higher Education Systems" systematically examines diffusion processes and their effects with regard to a rather neglected policy area – the case of European higher education policy. The thesis contributes to the slowly growing number of comparative and mechanism-based studies on policy diffusion and represents the first study on the diffusion of policies between European Higher Education Systems. The main aim is to contrast and compare testable and coherent explanatory models on the functioning of different diffusion mechanisms. Three sets of explanatory models on the relationship between variables triggering and conditioning diffusion mechanisms and their impact on policy adoption are drawn from mechanism-based thinking on policy diffusion: on learning, socialization, and externalities. These approaches conceptualize the policy process in terms of interdependencies between international and national actors. Explanatory models based on assumptions about domestic policies and the common responses of countries to similar policy problems extend this theoretical framework. The thesis is based on event history modelling of policy change and adoption in higher education systems of 16 West European countries between the yeas 1980 and 1998. Overall 14 policy items describing performance-orientated reforms for public universities ranging from the adoption of external quality assurance systems to tuition fees are examined. Empirically, the main research question is what international, national and policy-specific factors cause and condition diffusion processes and the adoption of public policies? Evidence can be found for and against all of the four theoretical approaches tested. In comparison, many of the assumptions related to interdependencies lack robustness, whereas the common response model is the most stable one. This does not mean that explanatory models based on interdependent decision-making are not suitable for analysing policy diffusion in higher education. Rather interdependency is a multi- dimensional concept that requires a comparative assessment of diffusion mechanisms. Some of explanatory factors based on interdependent decision- making are still supported by the empirical analysis though. From this point of view, the recommendation for analysing diffusion is to start with a model based on domestic politics, that is successively extended by explanatory factors dealing with interdependencies between international and national actors. Diffusion variables matter – but it is only one side of the tale on policy diffusion.