Government agencies and their roles in the diffusion of intellectual property policy in China: analysis based on a policy literature reference network
| Date | 01 December 2021 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0020852319877940 |
| Published date | 01 December 2021 |
| Author | Jianqin Xiang,Feicheng Ma |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
International
Review of
Administrative
Sciences
Government agencies
and their roles in the
diffusion of intellectual
property policy in China:
analysis based on
a policy literature
reference network
Jianqin Xiang
Wuhan University, China
Feicheng Ma
Wuhan University, China
Abstract
The relationship between government agencies is an important basis for the continuo us
innovation and diffusion of policies. This research explores how government agencies,
as policymakers and promoters, play an important role in the innovation and diffusion
of intellectual property policies in China. Based on the reference relationship in the
policy literature, we build a large sample of intellectual property policy diffusion net-
works in China and present the trends and characteristics of government agencies’
policy diffusion. The results show that intellectual property policy diffusion in China is
positively related to many institutional factors, for example, network positioning,
authority, economic development level, and policy timeliness, but it is not significantly
correlated with geographical proximity.
Points for practitioners
This study helps to understand how government relationships affect policy diffusion in
this particular political environment in China. The conclusions of this study on the role
Corresponding author:
Feicheng Ma, Wuhan University, School Information Management, Wuhan 430072, Hubei, Peoples
Republic of China.
Email: fchma@whu.edu.cn
International Review of
Administrative Sciences
!The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/0020852319877940
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2021, Vol. 87(4) 888–907
of government agencies in policy diffusion can provide some guidance for public admin-
istration departments to formulate and disseminate policies, and expand the study of
intergovernmental relations and policy innovation from the perspective of policy text
mining and quantification.
Keywords
China, government agencies, intellectual property, network, policy diffusion, policy
literatures
Introduction
In its most generic form, policy diffusion is defined as one government’s policy
choices being influenced by the choices of other governments (Shipan and Volden,
2012). The pressure of policy innovation has led to the spread of policies among
different government agencies, and there are four mechanisms of policy diffusion:
learning from earlier adopters; economic competition among proximate cities; the
imitation of larger cities; and coercion by governments (Wu and Zhang, 2018).
Previous studies found that the authority and geographical proximity of govern-
ment agencies and the issue the similarity of policies have an impact on policy
diffusion (Gu, 2015; Hughes et al., 2018; Liu and Li, 2016; Ruiz-Villaverde et al.,
2017). Scholarly and public discussions have separately highlighted important
influences on policy diffusion from various intergovernmental relations, such as
interpersonal relationships between agencies, hierarchical relationships, financial
relations, or competitive relationships (Huang et al., 2017; Liu and Li, 2016; Wu
and Zhang, 2018; Zhu and Zhao, 2018), but a lack of comprehensive understand-
ing of relationships between governments means that little is known about how an
agency’s own attributes and connections with other agencies influence policy
diffusion.
Moreover, despite focused attention on the diffusion mechanism of social policy
innovations at different levels of government, how to identify intergovernmental
relations from policies is still a difficult problem to be solved. Previous studies have
identified the relationship between policies and their issuers based on historical
events through policy text coding and the manual identification of policy adoption
in order to build a policy diffusion network (Motta, 2018; Zhu and Zhao, 2018).
However, while this research method can ensure the high accuracy of policy
diffusion data, its sample selection is bound to be limited, and it is difficult to
establish a wide-ranging relationship between policy-issuing agencies. This article
draws on the method proposed by Huang et al. (2017) to extract the reference
relationship in China’s intellectual property (IP) policy literature and related policy
literature in an automated way, and builds China’s IP policy diffusion network in
order to explore the role of government agencies in the network. Since the 1990s,
889
Xiang and Ma
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