Punctuations and diversity: exploring dynamics of attention allocation in China’s E-government agenda

ABSTRACT

Existing literature regarding punctuated equilibrium theories (PET) and agenda diversity has examined the patterns of cross-domain attention allocation based on western democracies; however, few studies have systematically discussed the situation within a specific policy domain in transitioning countries. To address this research gap, this study empirically explored the punctuations and diversity in attention allocation within China’s national e-government issue from 2001 to 2018. By employing the latent Dirichlet allocation topic model to analyse relevant articles on e-government in the People’s Daily, we derived 10 distinct dimensions hidden in the corpora and constructed an original dataset of the e-government agenda. The empirical findings revealed that the information processing in the domain of the e-government in China are leptokurtic, and a gradual decrease in the intensity of punctuations with the enhancement of central coordination and civic participation was also observed. We also found that the dynamics of attention diversity partially followed the theoretical expectations of classic scholarships. By examining patterns of attention allocation across multiple dimensions within a certain policy, our findings speak to literature on PET and agenda diversity and increases the externality of relevant theories derived from the cross-domain analysis.

KEYWORDS:

• Attention allocation
• punctuated equilibrium
• attention diversity
• E-government
• topic model

Acknowledgements

The earlier version of this article was presented at a seminar in Tsinghua University of China in 2019.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See the details for LDA analytical procedures in the online supporting information.

2 The most representative document is the document to which a given topic contributes the most information. There is a model in Gensim providing the results of the most representative document for each topic.

3 We also illustrated how the proportion of attention paid to the different dimensions will vary from 2001 to 2018, which is shown in the online supporting information.

4 According to Breunig and Jones (2011), L-kurtosis is a less sensitive measure to extreme values, compared to Kurtosis.

5 Due to limited access to spending data in the e-government, it is difficult to directly compare patterns of budgetary spending and official media attention allocation in the e-government field in China. Although the budgetary data from Chan and Zhao (2016) is the best data that we can presently obtain, we acknowledge that this is not a perfect “apples-to-apples” comparison. In this regard, we call for improvements in future comparative studies.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Qingguo Meng

Qingguo Meng is a professor at the School of Public Policy & Management in Tsinghua University, China. His research mainly focuses on e-government and performance management.

Ziteng Fan

Ziteng Fan is an assistant professor at the Institute for Global Public Policy in Fudan University, China. His latest research mainly focuses on e-government, public sector innovation and policy process theories. Ziteng Fan is the corresponding author.