The Dynamics Of Local Government Innovation In Contemporary China:Factors And Models

Local government innovation is a matter of interest to the governance reform of every country and also a hot topic of social science research in the past several decades.In recent years,the dynamics of local government innovation weakens dramatically,and has become a common issue for most countries.Prominent scholarly work on the dynamics of local government innovation has been dominated by two distinct approaches.One approach mainly focuses on exhausting all possible dynamic factors of government innovation.Another prefers to make one specific dynamic factor the centre of enquiry,discussing how the dynamic factor influences the government's innovative behaviour.These researches have already made great contribution to discovering different dynamic factors of local government innovation,classifying the dynamics of innovation and revealing the impact mechanism of some dynamic factors.However,they have also left an important research gap in the field of the dynamics of local government innovation by retaining their separate emphases.We endeavour to fill this gap by combining and applying the insights of both the theory of institutional change and current findings to propose a comprehensive analytical framework.This framework assumes that local governments are in a relatively stable institutional environment,and it distinguishes the dynamics of local government innovation into indirect dynamics and direct dynamics according to whether or not the factor forms from inside of the local government.The former refers to those factors that stimulate local governments' willingness to innovate,including the imposed part and the induced part.The later one comes from the cost-benefit analysis of local governments.If the benefits of innovation exceed its costs,local governments will be more likely to conduct the innovation.Otherwise,they will prefer to keep status quo.Then,in order to exam the construct validity and explanatory power of this framework,we carry out a questionnaire survey in Zhejiang Province and adopt SPSS and AMOS to do Exploratory Factor Analysis and Confirmatory Factor Analysis respectively.According to the results of statistical analysis,we slightly modify the analytical framework.The revised framework has better construct validity and theoretical suitability,which means that it can appropriately reflect the dynamics of local government innovation in practice.Further,we also employ the concepts of "induced" and "imposed",together with the difference of local governments' initiative of innovation,building a classification model of local government innovation.Following these criteria,we conclude eight main dynamic models of local government innovation in contemporary China.They are Mandatory Innovation,Championship Innovation,Central-Local Interaction Innovation,Implementation Innovation,Initiative Exploration Innovation,Specialist Promoting Innovation,Technology-Driven Innovation and Pressure-Response Innovation.The contribution of this article may lie on three parts:first,this study introduces the Institutional Change Theory to analyse the dynamics of local government innovation;Second,it proposes a comprehensive analytical framework of the dynamics of local government innovation,and then adopts new methods,such as Structural Equation Model and Principle Factor Analysis,to justify and modify the framework;third,this article also tries to build a classification model of the dynamics of local government innovation,summarising eight main dynamic models of local government innovation in contemporary China.