Experimentalist Constitutions: Subnational Policy Innovations in China, India, and the United States by Yueduan Wang

Yueduan Wang’s Experimentalist Constitutions is an ambitious cross-national study that offers a constitutional explanation for subnational policy experimentation across multiple contexts. The book argues that two primary factors—constitutional structure and political competition between parties or factions—affect the degree of policy innovation at the subnational level.

Undergirding this thesis is a set of bold assumptions about the value of comparison across seemingly disparate contexts: first, that authoritarian constitutions play a similar role to democratic constitutions in shaping policymaking at the subnational level, and second, that factional politics within an authoritarian one-Party state can be productively compared to interparty competition in a democracy.

The book makes this argument through exploration of three case studies (the United States, India, and China), each analyzed in its own long chapter. In the United States, Wang argues, subnational policy experimentation has evolved over time, from a model of state-to-state diffusion of policy innovations to a model in which the federal government plays a central role in encouraging policy innovation and facilitating the diffusion of new policies between states. The book illustrates these shifting dynamics through four case studies (women’s suffrage, unemployment benefits, the Clean Air Act, and Medicaid expansion). These shifts are due to changes in the judicial interpretation of the balance of state versus federal power, but also to shifts in partisan politics, as rising political polarization has encouraged some states to openly challenge federal policies.

Chapter Two explores the case of India. Wang notes that while the balance of federal and local power in the Indian constitution traditionally gave the federal government significant control, state authority and fiscal resources began to grow in the 1980s, though the federal government has attempted to reassert control under the leadership of Narendra Modi and the BJP. India’s “combination of decentralized and centralized features has generally made it a fertile ground for experimentation,” Wang notes (p. 92)—including some antidemocratic “innovations” that encourage discrimination and violence against Indian Muslims.

The third chapter focuses on China, where scholars have long noted that centralized, top-down political control exists alongside significant experimentation and policy innovation at the subnational level. Wang argues that the Chinese political system moves between “coordinated,” “muted,” and “fragmented” phases. When the dominant political faction at the central level also includes a significant number of subnational leaders, central-level leaders have a strong incentive to protect their subnational counterparts, and experimentation thrives (and can scale up from individual localities to the whole country relatively easily). Experimentation is less likely when the dominant central-level faction has few subnational members and thus little incentive to protect subnational allies who engage in policy innovation (the “muted” phase). When no single faction is dominant, central-level patrons protect their subnational allies who engage in policy experimentation—just as they do in the “coordinated” phase—but are largely unable to scale localized innovations up to the national level.

The book concludes with a comparison of the three cases, focusing on lessons learned regarding the importance of courts and non-governmental actors across contexts. It also reflects on the prospects for subnational policy innovation in China in the future, given the recentralization of politics and dampening of factional competition that have occurred under the leadership of Xi Jinping. Ultimately, Wang concludes that Xi Jinping has not yet fundamentally altered the existing “Two Initiatives” framework that enables central control to coexist with local policy experimentation and argues that a return to a more experimental model of policymaking in China is possible.

Wang’s book provides a useful description of the varying forms that local policy experimentation can take across a varied range of contexts. It also demonstrates how institutional arrangements—which vary both between countries and over time—may shape both the degree of subnational experimentation and the ways in which experiments scale up. This descriptive picture is a clear and useful overview, though it relies very heavily on secondary sources (in the India case in particular) rather than on original research and thus may not contribute significantly to the understanding of those who are already knowledgeable about subnational policymaking in one or more of the three country cases.

What counts as “subnational policy innovation”? Wang states that “the cases [experiments] were selected because they were significant subnational policy innovations that successfully addressed an important policy issue shared by other subnational jurisdictions or the nation as a whole” (p. 7). However, this logic does not seem to fit the “experiments” in illiberalism described in the book, such as the rise of Hindu nationalism—including significant anti-Muslim violence—in Gujarat. The inclusion of this example points to some conceptual stretching in the book, whereby the line between “policy innovation” and other types of subnational activity is not always clear. Future work could productively explore the relationship between experimentalism, innovation, and other elements of subnational policymaking to more clearly delineate between these different categories.

The book also raises, but does not fully answer, questions about the possibility of a broadly comparable conceptualization of constitutionalism. Wang notes that the book’s focus is on “constitutional systems,” rather than just written constitutions. This is a necessary move in the case of China—the PRC’s written constitution is secondary to the political authority of the Chinese Communist Party, and Wang notes that there is a “clear divergence between constitutional texts and practices” in China (p. 127). Wang’s solution is to broaden the set of written laws and formal and informal political and legal practices that fall under the umbrella of constitutionalism to include “the Constitution, the statutes, and the other rules and practices of the party-state,” including “nonlegislative norms” that relate to “the role, powers, or structures of different entities within a state, the relationship between different levels of government, or the fundamental rights of the people,” and that “must be entrenched enough … that it cannot be changed as easily as ordinary laws or policies” (p. 128). This extremely expansive definition of constitutionalism creates some challenges, however. First, it limits the conceptual utility of constitutionalism, which now seems to encompass most formal and many informal elements of the Chinese political system. It is already widely understood that local experimentation has been an important part of Chinese politics in the post-Mao era; employing a definition of constitutionalism that overlaps with “politics” so broadly thus means that the book largely confirms existing knowledge rather than making a novel contribution. Furthermore, if such an all-encompassing definition of constitutionalism is necessary in the Chinese case, this casts doubt on the possibility of a meaningful comparison between China and the other two cases in the book, in which written constitutions exert meaningful constraints on politics and the author’s understanding of “constitutionalism” appears to be much narrower. Wang is right to point out that local experimentation has been an important element of politics across all three cases, in ways that have changed over time and in response to shifts in partisan or factional politics. However, the book is less successful at showing that this experimentation relates to constitutional systems in a way that can be productively compared across three very different countries.