Policy attention and the adoption of public sector innovation

ABSTRACT

We explore the nuanced role of policy attention in the adoption of public sector innovation by differentiating it between the issue and dimension levels. Using the case of Chinese online service platforms (OSPs), we find that provinces are more likely to adopt OSPs if they pay more attention to e-government issues or define e-government more as economic-related issues. The findings enrich our understanding of the pivotal role of policy attention in eliciting digital innovations and contribute to the literature on innovation adoption and e-government. Managing policy attention is a more flexible alternative than organizational and environmental leverages to facilitate innovations.

KEYWORDS:

• Policy attention
• innovation adoption
• online service platforms
• policy diffusion
• digital governance

Acknowledgments

An earlier version of this paper was presented in a workshop held at Tsinghua University, China. The authors would like to thank the participants for developmental comments. The Correspondence of the paper should go to Liang Ma.

Disclosure statement

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

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1080/14719037.2022.2050283.

Notes

1. Besides economic and democratic issues, social issues have been also increasingly mentioned in Chinese government agenda. However, the major objective of e-government is to enhance economic growth, which is confirmed by the LDA results (see Figure A1 in the Online Appendix).

2. For example, five-year plans and government work reports are two alternatives used to measure policy attention. However, they are not applicable to our research context. First, both are documents covering a very broad range of policy issues. Therefore, any certain policy issue can only occupy very small space in the main texts, which cannot offer enough textual data to conduct content analysis and reveal the patterns of issue definition of a specific policy issue. This is especially the case for e-government, as it usually takes up a few sentences in these documents. Furthermore, the five-year plan is updated every five years, which is not applicable to our annual analysis. Recently, some scholars also use central leaders’ written directives to measure policy attention (Chen, Christensen, and Ma 2019). However, due to information sensitivity and secrecy, scholars usually have very limited access to them in recent periods.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (71774164; 72104052), Ministry of Education in China Project of Humanities and Social Sciences (21YJC810001), and the Major Program of the National Social Science Fund of China (20&ZD071).

Notes on contributors

Ziteng Fan

Ziteng Fan is Assistant Professor at the Institute for Global Public Policy, Fudan University, Shanghai, China His research interests include digital governance and innovation.

Tom Christensen

Tom Christensen is Professor of Public Administration and Policy at the Department of Political Science, University of Oslo, Norway. His research interests include public organization theory and crisis management.

Liang Ma

Liang Ma is Professor at the School of Public Administration and Policy, Renmin University of China, China. His research interests include organizational innovation and digital governance.