Policy punctuations and agenda diversity in China: a national level analysis from 1980 to 2019

ABSTRACTBased on data sources systematically tracking government activity such as budgets and bill hearings, the Punctuated Equilibrium Theory literature has demonstrated that policy processes in both democracies and nondemocracies feature long periods of stasis interrupted by dramatic changes. However, there is a lack of research that systematically examines China's policy process. In response, this article introduces a new dataset drawn from China State Council Gazettes from 1980 to 2019 to measure policy punctuations and agenda diversity in China. We find that punctuations in China's policy process are more intense than those in democracies. The findings further show that China's policy process features more positive punctuations than negative punctuations. We also find an overall increasing trend of agenda diversity and a pattern of alternation between agenda expansion and concentration across the forty years analyzed in this paper. These findings provide new long-term evidence regarding patterns of policy stability and change in the Chinese context and contribute to our understanding of China's politics of attention and its linkage with information inefficiency and survival politics.KEYWORDS: Policy punctuationpunctuated equilibrium theoryChinaagenda diversityChina's policy process Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 In November 2017, we established a coding team to initiate construction of the database.2 Admittedly, there are prominent differences between China and the West. To make sure comparatability, during the coding process, we kept in a close touch with the American policy agenda team led by Jones. We discussed through revisions of the codebook, and unanimously agreed to revising the CAP coding scheme only on subtopic level. For example, special subtopics, such as "Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan issues" and "spiritual civilization and ideological education", were added to ensure validity. It has taken more than three years to finish the manual coding work.Additional informationNotes on contributorsXiaolei QinXiaolei Qin is a professor in Public Administration in the School of Public Administration at Nanjing Normal University. Her research focuses on comparative agenda policy. She has published more than 30 academic papers and completed six research projects.Jing HuangJing Huang is a Ph.D. candidate in Public Administration in the School of Government at Nanjing University. His research focuses on policy process theories and computational social science methods.