Required Number of Member States Sample Clauses

Required Number of Member States. ‌ In order for the NPVC to become legally binding, the Electoral votes of its signatories must total 270 - the threshold presidential candidates must cross to win the election. Though compacts are qualitatively and legally similar to contracts, this paper conceptu- alizes them as policies to be adopted rather than agreements to be joined (after all, in many cases it is the state legislatures who vote on whether or not to join). As Xxxxxx and Xxxxx (2007) observe, the motivation behind compact membership is often “multi-faceted, involving issues of capacity, the actions of other governments both state and national, and...politics” (363). The primary advantage of this approach is that it becomes possible to analyze the NPVC through the lens of policy diffusion. Policy diffusion - the spread of innovations or regulations across geographies - is a subject of immense scholarly interest. The literature, accordingly, is vast and contains a diverse set of approaches, methods, and findings. It is not my intent to oversimplify this fascinating area of study, even for use as a frame of reference in my hypotheses. But when viewed as a policy with the potential to diffuse, the NPVC becomes less myste- rious and more accessible. It becomes possible to question what causes the NPVC to “diffuse” to other states since a body of scholarly evidence can provide clues. For my purposes, the definition of policy diffusion offered by Simons, Xxxxxx, and Xxxxxxx (2006, 787) will suffice: “[P]olicy diffusion occurs when government policy decisions in a given [jurisdiction] are sys- tematically conditioned by prior policy choices made in other [jurisdictions].” Though this conceptualization was originally put forward in the context of international policy diffusion, Xxxxxxx (2016, 9) has accurately pointed out that its ideas “can be adapted to fit the vast majority of the processes that political scientists are interested in.”2