Non-Proportionate Response and Levels of Aggregation

Policy bubbles can occur at different levels of scale, differing in size by orders of magnitude. Small ones may occur within a single government program with little impact on neighboring or related programs. Others reverberate within connected programs or institutions. Still others can affect huge portions of government, the entire size of a national government, or a global system. I explore these dynamics empirically and suggest mechanisms by which these scale-free dynamics may occur.