Policy adoption and diffusion during the COVID-19 crisis

ABSTRACT

During the COVID-19 crisis, what explains the variation in policy adoptionamong Chinese provincial governments? To answer this question, we gathered data on twenty-five COVID-19 containment policies used in China from 31 December 2019 to 18 March 2020. We conducted state-of-the-art multilevel pooled event history analysis to allow us to control for policy heterogeneity. Our results demonstrate that variation in policy adoption during the crisis largely follows politics as usual: policies diffuse from the centre to the provinces in the same way that non-crisis policies diffuse. Our findings highlight the political dynamics of policy adoption and crisis response within China.

KEYWORDS:

• Policy diffusion
• policy adoption
• COVID-19
• multilevel pooled event history analysis

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. Hubei was excluded from analysis

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Yuehong Tai

Yuehong Cassandra Tai is a postdoctoral scholar at the Center for Social Data Analytics, Penn State University. Her areas of research include comparative public opinion, public policy, and Chinese politics.

Jielu Yao

Jielu Yao is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Wesleyan University. Her research interests center on computational social science, public policy, and political communication. Jielu received her Ph.D. from the University of Iowa in Political Science in 2020.

Elise Pizzi

Elise Pizzi is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Iowa. Her research primarily focuses on rural development and public goods provision. Her work on China has focused on ethnic politics, migration, and drinking water provision. Other research explores environmental migration and government response to natural disasters.