Policy-Making beyond the Nation State

More intense and extensive cross-national flows of trade, capital, people and information can destabilize policies which were previously implicitly based on assumptions of restricted mobility. Nonetheless, such desta-bilization does not itself automatically prescribe the nature of the policy models which follow (Blyth, 2002: 35). Indeed, tracing the impact of cross-national pressures on policy-making is a highly complicated task. Broadly, such pressures can exert influence in two directions: by changing the structural incentives for policy-makers, and by promoting or proscribing certain courses of action (Jakobsen, 2010: 895).