ABSTRACT
The issues of policy convergence and, more specifically, policy learning, have recently
come to occupy a central position in the study of comparative policy research. Yet
policy learning has been with us for a long time. At the beginning of the twentieth
century the German historian Otto Hintze argued that constitutional and administrative
change in Europe ceased to be explicable solely through conditions he described as
bodensta¨ndig – literally conditions arising from the soil.1 To him, they were the
result of the more-or-less conscious influence of currents of thought, if not outright bor-
rowing, at the start of the nineteenth century. Thus, German municipal reform in the
nineteenth century was shaped by perceptions of English local self-government, and
later on in the nineteenth century there is evidence that German conditions fed their
way back into the wave of municipal reform in Britain after the 1880s. Germany
and Britain have therefore long been influential in supplying some of the key
models and concepts that have shaped the development of public policies and the insti-
tutions that generate them. The significance of policy and institutional developments in
these two countries, not only for each other but also for the rest of Europe and beyond,
makes the question of how they have influenced each other especially interesting and
important for the comparative study of public policy.
