Diffusion And Reinvention In Policymaking: Evidence From Chinese Provincial Governments

In the era of big data,government data continues to accumulate.As managers of public affairs and providers of public services,government agencies have the responsibility and obligation to manage government data.As the legal basis for government data management,government data management policies have spread in China.In the process of policy diffusion,the government does not blindly copy the original policy text,but makes adaptive changes according to its own conditions.This phenomenon is policy reinvention.Existing research has rarely focused on the policy reinvention in the process of diffusion.Based on this,this thesis intends to answer the following questions: What policy reinvention has been carried out in China’s provincial government data management policy? What factors affect policy reinvention?This thesis uses the grounded theory method to establish the policy reinvention analysis framework.A comparative research approach was used to discover empirical relationships in selected cases.Qualitative comparative analysis was used to study what influences policy reinvention.The thesis found that China’s provincial government data management policies show the following trends: the policy system is expanding,and the characteristics of specialization and diversification are prominent;Standardized management of government data,and free flow of data become a consensus;Gradually pay attention to the protection of the rights and interests of data subjects,and centralized construction of data resource management platform.In general,there are differences in the results of policy reinvention among provinces.Some provinces have carried out more policy reinvention,while some provinces have completely copied the policies of other provinces.In terms of what factors affect policy reproduction,the study found that policy reinvention is the result of the combined effect of multiple factors.Three high-level configurations and two non-high-level configurations are obtained through configurational comparative analysis.Through the internal and external model,the five configurations are described as self-optimized,compound-driven,and passive-adopted.