Punctuated Equilibrium And Policy Change

All kinds of social contradictions in China's transition period are manifested through the bottom-up policy initiative movement,which promotes the policy change.And what is the logic of such policy changes?Why did the policy change?Most of the existing studies use case analysis,and no macro and systematic causal explanation has been obtained.Among many theories of policy change,the punctuated equilibrium framework focuses on short-term sudden policy changes.The framework combines the concepts of policy image,policy venue,subsystem and macro system,attention and so on,and has a strong explanatory power to sudden policy changes.This study modifies the punctuated equilibrium framework,emphasizing that in the process of policy implementation,the strategic interaction between the policy subject and object,that is,state actors and social actors,is the key to insight into policy changes.Although there is no lack of attention to interaction in the framework itself,interaction is rarely verified in empirical studies.Therefore,this study operates the interaction into "interaction intensity" and "interaction frequency",and embeds it into the punctuated equilibrium framework to establish a new theoretical model,which tries to analyze the path of policy change in the context of China.This paper integrates 57 cases from academic journals and employs the qualitative comparative analysis method to get the causal combinations and path types that affect the policy change.We found two main conclusions.Firstly,the "interactivity" factors have a strong explanatory power.When the social actors adopt the tough strategy,the policy change is more likely to occur.But when the state actors adopt the strong strategy,the policy change is more difficult to achieve.Besides,multi-round interaction has also proved to be a sufficient condition for policy change.Secondly,the causal paths of policy change can be divided into three types:"pressure-change"type,"mutual benefit-change" type and "pressure-authority-semi-compromise" type.Under different types,the movement cost for policy object is different.The cost of "pressure-authority-semi-compromise" is the highest,and the cost of "mutual benefit-change" is the lowest.This reflects the problem of the input channel of opinion and the difficulty of top-down mobilization,and also puts forward new requirements for our government to shift the decision-making mode.