The rise of the idea of model in policymaking

Abstract

The paper addresses the question whether national decision-making has become increasingly interdependent in recent decades, and what role world models play in any such trend. These questions are scrutinised by utilising the Historic Hansard corpus, which contains all records of the UK Parliament from 1803 to 2005, complemented by other corpora. The results show that references to other countries were most frequent in parliamentary debates very early in the 19th century. However, allusions to other countries have evolved from referencing case examples to referencing policies that are constructed and branded as models. The idea of transferable models caught on particularly strongly from the 1950s onward. The other corpora used for the study confirmed that these changes reflect a global trend. Hence, the post-war era has witnessed a worldwide spread of the idea of model as a precondition for a global proliferation of named models.