“Fabrizio Gilardi”:http://poliscizurich.wordpress.com/2011/01/04/diffusion-everywhere-dumb-and-dumber-edition/
In an “article”:http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0491.2010.01501.x/abstract on national tax blacklists recently published in Governance, J. C. Sharman has the brilliant idea of looking at the replication of errors as evidence of diffusion. The best example involves Venezuela literally copying and pasting Mexico’s legislation:
[T]he Venezuelan legislation made reference to the wishes of the Mexican legislature and the need to be consistent with the Mexican constitution. Worse still, the original Mexican list had included Venezuela, and thus by copying the Mexican list, Venezuela succeeded in blacklisting itself.
The idea of measuring diffusion processes through looking for repeated errors is not a new one (see for example “this piece”:http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com.proxygw.wrlc.org/doi/10.1002/asi.4630340206/abstract on bibliographic cut-and-pasting), although this is quite possibly the first application in political science. The kinds of data provided by “MemeTracker”:http://www.memetracker.org provide an interesting way of doing this on an automated basis for very large corpuses drawn from online news sources. Memetracker can find variant phrases quite easily, which could plausibly serve as markers that would allow researchers (sometimes) to track specific lines of influence across sources.