[Anu Bradford is Professor of Law at Columbia Law School]
Katerina Linos’ book provides a novel, intriguing and highly compelling theoretical and empirical account for how and why foreign models diffuse across borders. Voters have limited information and patience to evaluate policy proposals their government advance. Benchmarking these proposals against policies that international organizations have endorsed, or that large, culturally proximate, and successful countries have adopted, provides a powerful and low-cost way of convincing the general public of the expected success of the policy. This explains why international models shape public policy and explain legislative outcomes in democracies.
The book offers a distinctly fresh perspective on the contested relevance of international organizations (IOs). These institutions’ power to convey a clear message of what is competent and mainstream, and the use of that message to gain an electoral advantage domestically, heightens their influence in a way that has thus far not been understood. This contribution is therefore likely to have a significant and lasting impact in the discussions of international law and institutions.
Linos’ decision to test her theory on health and family policies, which are politically contested and fiscally significant, makes her book all the more interesting. This choice allows for a particularly original look at the influence of international law, which rarely focuses on social policy questions. Governments have tried to shape the family decisions on women’s employment and the fertility patterns for decades, the book notes. Their desire to do so will likely only increase with the looming demographic crises across the developed world, which calls for increasing women’s participation in the labor force while also heightening the need to grow the size of their families.
The empirical discussion of family policy diffusion across OECD countries (Chapter 6) and as well as the quantitative and qualitative study of family policy developments in Greece and Spain (Chapter 7) offer a strong and often surprising support for her thesis. Looking at the evidence from 18 OECD countries over 25 years, Linos shows how international organizations and cross-country influences explain domestic regulatory choices and spending patterns in the field of family policy. The diffusion of maternity leaves has been particularly striking, which is explained by the existence of strong and coherent international models. Family benefits have diffused considerably less in large part due to the lack of such benchmarks. This pattern—uniform maternity leave policies and differential family benefit policies—is confirmed in her study on the adoption of maternity leaves and family benefits in Greece and Spain.
The book emphasizes the relative success of the International Labor Organization (ILO) over the EU in promoting family policies and highlights the power of soft law over hard law to diffuse successfully. The ILO’s greater success in promoting maternity leaves compared to that of the EU—which is vested with the ability to generate hard law and pursue legal action against reluctant emulators— serves as one indicator of this.
However, an alternative reading of Linos’ work could be that of irrelevance of the binding versus non-binding distinction when measuring the influence of international norms.
