Research On The Effects Of Policy Agenda Setting On The Environmental Governance Performance

The attention allocation of organizations or decision makers is the core issue of management research.Since the 1950s,with the proposal of bounded rational decision-making model,there have been a large number of empirical studies on attention allocation.Most of these studies focused on the enterprise level in the early stage,which were devoted to exploring the factors that affect the attention allocation of decision makers or consumers.Until the early 1990s,scholars began to focus on the attention allocation of government,i.e.,"policy agenda-setting".Compared with enterprises or individuals,the government not only faces more complex public affairs,but also needs to respond to the differentiated interest demands.Moreover,attention is scarce,so the research on agenda-setting is particularly necessary.At present,many literatures have studied the characteristics of agenda's change and the factors affecting agenda-setting,but they have not paid more attention to the relationship between agenda-setting and governance performance.In other words,the existing literature can not give a clear answer to "whether and how the government's attention allocation affects its governance performance of specific public affairs".In addition,can the agenda setting theory born in the western institutional background explain the Chinese phenomenon?What are the characteristics of China's agenda-setting?More importantly,as China enters the transition period of economic and social development,green,low-carbon and sustainability have become a new requirement for development.From the perspective of attention allocation,how can local governments balance the relationship between economic development and environmental protection?Can the government's attention to environmental issues effectively improve regional environmental performance?What is the impact of government's attention to economic growth on environmental performance?Based on the theory of attention management,agenda setting and environmental governance,this paper focuses on the policy agenda and environmental governance of central and provincial governments in China,and uses the research methods such as NMF topic modeling,qualitative text coding,DEA analysis,econometric modeling and other statistical tests to response above research questions.According to the methodology principle of "phenomenon-questions-literature-data-hypothesis-model-examination-discussion",this paper constructs an empirical research from descriptive analysis to causal inference and mechanism test.The main contents and workload of this research are as follows:(1)Based on the topic modeling,this article systematically presents and verifies the structure and changing characteristics of the macro-policy agenda of China.First,this research obtains 1093 text data sets of the daily meetings of the Central Committee of Chinese Communist Party and the State Council from 2003 to 2019,and makes quantitative analysis of the text data by using NMF topic modeling.Second,this article further introduces relevant statistics to test the punctuated equilibrium characteristics of China's macro policy agenda,and makes a comparative analysis with western countries.Finally,this article measures the diversity of China's macro policy agenda through the information entropy index,and discusses the impact of policy venue's change on attention diversity by taking environmental governance as an example.(2)This paper collects the data sets of press releases of 30 provincial local government executive meetings from 2008 to 2017(n=6697),and uses the topic modeling and content analysis to identify,code,classify and count the policy topics of each text,so as to develop a category system suitable for analyzing the policy attention of China's local governments,and measures the relative attention level of each provincial government on a single policy issue each year.(3)This article estimates the environmental performance in 30 provinces from 2008 to 2017 by using DEA analysis,and then uses the DEA-Tobit model and stepwise regression method to test the impact of the provincial government's attention to different issues on regional environmental performance and its mechanism.(4)This article makes a narrative analysis of the macro institutional change of environmental governance in China since 1972,and puts forward the relevant hypothesis of the relationship among the macro institutional change,policy agenda setting,and regional environmental performance.Then,this article uses the generalized DID and moderate effect model to test the treatment effect of macro institutional strengthening on environmental governance in 2015 and its moderating effect on the relationship between provincial governments'attention and environmental performance.The main findings and contributions of this article are as follows:(1)This study realizes the visualization of macro policy agenda structure of China and enriches the theoretical interpretation of the characteristics of China's agenda change.The research reveals the punctuated characteristics of China's macro policy agenda,which is less intensely punctuated than those in western states.In addition,after 2013,the structure of the policy agenda of the Party central has changed significantly,because its focus on policy issues is more diverse than before.The reason for this change lies in the establishment of the Leading Group for Comprehensively Deepening Reform of the Party central,which has effectively expanded the agenda space of the Party,so that the Party central has more time,space and policy resources to solve the governance challenges in transition period.(2)This study proposes a method to measure local government policy attention based on topic model with text coding and further clarifies the relationship and mechanism between local government agenda setting and environmental governance performance,thus contributing new knowledge for attention management and agenda setting theory.This article finds that the provincial government's attention to environmental protection significantly improves the provincial environmental performance,but there is no significant evidence that the government's attention to economic issues is negatively related to environmental performance.These results are due to the fact that the provincial government's attention to economic issues did not "squeeze" the agenda space of environmental issues during the sample period,that is,there is no obvious"attention competition" between the two types of policy issues.In addition,this article also finds that the provincial government's attention to environmental protection can improve environmental performance by increasing local environmental fiscal expenditures and optimizing regional industrial structure.(3)This article introduces variable of "institutional environment" into the empirical model of the relationship between agenda setting and environmental performance,which strengthens the explanation of the agenda setting theory on Chinese phenomena.This study finds that although China has formed a "local-oriented" environmental management system since 1980s,the "commander" role of the central government is increasingly prominent.In other words,when the central government introduces more rigid institutional design in environmental governance,local governments will put more "agenda space" in their daily governance to pay attention to environmental issues.The increase of policy attention will lead to the investment and optimal allocation of governance resources,thus contributing to improve the environmental performance.