This paper argues that attributes of diffusion objects, in their own right, shape the form and extent of policy diffusion. To date, diffusion scholarship focuses on actor-level attributes (e.g., connections, culture, physical proximity, etc.) to explain what is diffused and how much. Extending existing theory on the impacts of policies’ textual properties on diffusion patterns, we argue that policies that are easier to understand, specific in their applicability, and that do not mandate specific behavior have their text diffused with less adaptation, regardless of the attributes of the authoring organization. We test our argument in the context of the global diffusion of corporate sustainability policy (CSP), analyzing a novel dataset of 1,429 CSPs from 100 countries, 20 international organizations, and 12 regional organizations over a 65-year period. Offering a precise measure of diffusion as the extent to which a source text is copied into an adopter text, we find statistical support for our hypothesis. We contribute to diffusion scholarship by helping to mainstream natural language processing methods and by theorizing how attributes of policy documents affect how much adaptation occurs.

中文翻译：

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从扩散到扩散能力：解释企业可持续发展政策全球扩散的文本数据方法

本文认为，扩散对象的属性本身决定了政策扩散的形式和程度。迄今为止，传播学术关注于行动者层面的属性（例如，联系、文化、物理接近度等），以解释传播的内容和程度。扩展有关政策文本属性对扩散模式影响的现有理论，我们认为，更容易理解、适用性具体且不强制执行特定行为的政策，其文本的传播适应性较差，无论政策的属性如何。创作组织。我们在企业可持续发展政策 (CSP) 全球传播的背景下检验了我们的论点，分析了 65 年期间来自 100 个国家、20 个国际组织和 12 个区域组织的 1,429 个 CSP 的新数据集。我们提供了一种精确的扩散衡量标准，即源文本被复制到采用者文本中的程度，我们找到了支持我们假设的统计支持。我们通过帮助自然语言处理方法主流化以及理论化政策文件的属性如何影响适应的程度来为传播学术做出贡献。