By David Schultz | Governing Magazine
Many state legislatures are not professional or full-time, or they lack extensive research staff to undertake policy work. So they turn to other states to see what they have done. States may find out about other states’ policy initiatives at conferences, such as those of the Council of State Governments or the National Conference of State Legislatures, and then adopt those policies as their own with minor modifications.
Sometimes those policies are good ones, but more often borrowing from other states is a short-cut mechanism that results in policies that fail to deliver. States become creatures of me-tooism, repeating and replicating policy initiatives found elsewhere without asking if in fact they work. State are mythologized as laboratories of public-policy innovation. The reality is often they are no more than factories of replication, captured by political myths and doomed to re-enact failed policies.
