State Policy Innovativeness Revisited1

How do the American states vary in their propensity for innovativeness, or their willingness to adopt new policies sooner or later relative to other states? Most studies today use event history analysis to focus almost exclusively on one policy area at a time at the expense of a broader understanding of innovativeness as a characteristic of states. To return to the concept of innovativeness more broadly, our study revisits and updates the original approach taken by Walker (1969) by updating his average innovation scores with new data covering over 180 different policies. We use these data to construct a new, dynamic measure of innovativeness that addresses biases and shortcomings in the original measure, as well as providing associated measures of uncertainty. These new scores build on the logic of event history analysis to address issues such as right-censoring and to facilitate measuring changes in innovativeness over time. We then compare the two measures of innovativeness and evaluate differences across states, spatial patterns, and changes in innovativeness over time.