Explaining policy changes in authoritarian regime: modeling Provincial Environmental Policy Making in China

Abstract

Why and how public policy changes has been a primary field of research in the policy process literature. However, the scholarship has relied heavily on cases from Western democracies and has relatively little to say about how policy change occurs at all in authoritarian regimes where some of the common drivers of policy change are weakened if not actively suppressed. Focusing on environmental policy in China, this paper examines top-down control versus bottom-up pressure as competing contributors to policy change in an authoritarian setting. We test whether changes in environmental policy at the provincial level in China can be explained by bureaucratic response to the centralized promotion system or to grassroots campaigns. We use the ARCGIS system to engage the spatial structure of the data so that policy diffusion between neighboring provinces as an alternative source of change is controlled for.