A study of information processing in policymaking amid changing profiles of politicians and institutional arrangements in Hong Kong

Abstract

Since the handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997, the social and political landscape of Hong Kong had changed with anomalies. Externally, the number of non-government stakeholders interested in policymaking increased significantly while members of the Legislative Council and District Councils were elected rather than appointed. These changes complicated the context of the policymaking process in Hong Kong. Internally, there were also changes to the institutional arrangements of the Hong Kong government as well as the profiles and roles of the principal officials. In view of these changes together with the anomalies, it would be a timely opportunity to study how the Hong Kong government processes information in policymaking. The purpose of this research was to examine whether and how information processing might differ between principal officials with different backgrounds (i.e., outsiders or ex-civil servants) and under different chief executives. A particular focus of this research was how the institutional effect might be conditioned by the preferences of the policymakers (i.e., principal officials). Four different policy initiatives were chosen for this investigation. Research findings showed that although principal officials from outside of the Hong Kong government were generally expected to pay more attention to the views from external stakeholders, this was not the case in practice. Somehow, regardless of their backgrounds, principal officials tended to rely heavily on information that was processed by their respective team of civil servants due to the following reasons: information processing was still dominated by civil servants; civil servants were more familiar with the relevant laws, regulations, rules as well as procedures, and they were the ones to implement the policy initiatives. Findings also indicated that principal officials with different backgrounds might not make different policy decisions, which suggested that there might not be any differences in terms of performance between one group of principal officials to another. Furthermore, while all interviewees acknowledged that personal preferences of the principal officials and the changes in institutional arrangements were both relevant to information processing in the policymaking process, they perceived that institutional arrangements had the stronger influence. In conclusion, research findings suggested that changing the institutional arrangements instead of individual political appointees would be a more effective strategy in making substantial improvements and breakthroughs in the Hong Kong government.