How policy agendas change when autocracies liberalize: The case of Hong Kong, 1975–2016
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12602 |
| Date | 01 December 2019 |
| Author | Nick H. K. Or |
| Published date | 01 December 2019 |
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
How policy agendas change when autocracies
liberalize: The case of Hong Kong, 1975–2016
Nick H. K. Or
Department of Politics, University of Exeter
and Politics and International Relations,
University of Southampton, UK
Correspondence
Nick H. K. Or, Department of Politics,
University of Exeter, Amory Building, Rennes
Drive, Exeter EX4 4RJ, UK.
Email: nickhkor@gmail.com
Funding information
This work was supported by the Economic and
Social Research Council (grant number
ES/J500161/1)
Correction added on 15 July 2019, after first
online publication: Changes have been made
in this article to improve readability.
Abstract
This article considers how autocrats decide to expand or
narrow the issue diversity of their policy agenda during a
period of political liberalization. Prior studies have two com-
peting perspectives. First, political liberalization increases
the social and political freedom that enhances information
exchange, and thus expands issue diversity. Second, political
liberalization decreases government’s control of the legisla-
ture and thus narrows the issue diversity. This article offers
a novel theoretical perspective by combining these two
countervailing theories. Specifically, it predicts a diminishing
marginal benefit of information exchange and an increasing
marginal bargaining cost. As such, this article argues that
issue diversity follows a negative quadratic (inverted-U)
relationship as the regimes liberalize. The analysis of a new
and unique dataset of Hong Kong’s legislative agenda (1975
to 2016) offers support for this theory. This study sheds
light on policy-making in authoritarian regimes and democ-
racies, and advances the theory of information processing.
1|INTRODUCTION
Different policy issues compete with each other and are at the heart of the study of the policy-making processes
(John and Margetts 2003; Jennings et al. 2011; Bevan 2015; Greene 2016). Competition between issues inundates
policy-makers with a vast amount of information. Different political actors advocate different policy concerns and
problems from a wide range of issues such as the economy, trades, labour, public services, crime, transportation, wel-
fare, education, and health. The overwhelming information requires policy-makers to decide what to pay attention to
Received: 16 October 2018 Revised: 28 March 2019 Accepted: 22 April 2019
DOI: 10.1111/padm.12602
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and
reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
© 2019 The Author. Public Administration published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
926 Public Administration. 2019;97:926–941.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/padm
and what to ignore (Jones 2001; Jones and Baumgartner 2005; Walgrave and Dejaeghere 2017; Chan and Lam
2018). If the policy-makers pay no attention to a certain piece of information, policy change cannot take place
(Baumgartner et al. 2011, pp. 948–49). Therefore, understanding the allocation of attention has a profound implica-
tion on policy change.
This study examines the issue diversity of the policy agenda—the concentration of policy-makers’attention
across different policy issues. It looks at a portfolio of policy issues rather than a single or a few issues. The allocation
of attention to issues is not independent; paying more attention to one issue would inevitably mean less to another
(Zhu 1992). The study of the issue diversity of the policy agenda can capture the interdependence of policy attention
(True et al. 2007).
Most related work focusing on advanced democracies suggests that the electoral process has a vital role in shap-
ing political attention (Green-Pedersen and Mortensen 2010; Jennings et al. 2011; Greene 2016). They do not con-
sider, however, the possible effect of political liberalization on the issue diversity of the policy agenda. This article
considers how autocrats decide to expand or narrow their focus on policy issues in their finite policy portfolio. Theo-
rizing and examining how issues compete in authoritarian regimes when regimes liberalize provides an opportunity
to understand the effect of institutional change and political parties in the policy agenda debate.
Following Dahl’s classic work Polyarchy (1973), political liberalization is defined as more inclusive and competitive
elections (see also Coppedge et al. 2008). Political liberalization leads autocrats to have less control and political
advantage over political affairs. The process of political liberalization injects the systems with more democratic ele-
ments such as the right to elect and the right to be elected. In more inclusive and competitive elections, candidates
that do not belong to the governing party can participate in the electoral process and have a chance to enter the leg-
islature through electoral campaigns. Candidates thus have more freedom to organize and form a political party so
that they can have more political capital (Wahman 2011) and have a greater chance to defeat the autocrats (Levitsky
and Way 2010). An implication of the process of political liberalization, defined as more inclusive and competitive
elections, is that it increases the number of political parties and changes the partisan composition of the legislature—
moving the authoritarian regimes away from the common one-party system or one-party dominant system. As such,
it changes the party system and power distribution of the political system and alters the policy-making processes.
To understand the effect of political liberalization on the issue diversity of the policy agenda, this article offers a
hybrid model by combining the insights of the contradicting bargaining and information exchange perspectives on
policy processes. These two perspectives are distinct proponents developed in advanced democracies that explain
how changes in the composition of the legislature affect the policy processes. The bargaining perspective, informed
by the veto player, political gridlock and logrolling literature, asserts that a greater number of political parties
increases the costs of policy-making (Mayhew 1991; Tsebelis 2002; de Marchi and Laver forthcoming). A greater
number of political parties becomes an obstacle to the policy-making processes. It becomes more difficult to coordi-
nate and secure consensus. In this way, a higher bargaining cost reduces the total number of policies. As the entire
agenda space shrinks, the issue diversity of the policy agenda diminishes. In contrast, the information exchange pro-
cess, informed by the issue competition literature, suggests that political parties provide policy-relevant information,
expand policy-makers’political attention and result in greater a issue diversity of the policy agenda, meaning that
policy-makers become more attentive to policy issues from broader policy topics (Green-Pedersen and Mortensen
2010; Greene 2016). These two perspectives, however, yield opposite and unresolved theoretical expectations.
Following Walgrave and Varone (2008), the hybrid model of the issue diversity of the policy agenda treats politi-
cal parties as the key actors in the policy process. It argues that the electoral systems and the corresponding changes
in the partisan composition of the legislature are both the source of bargaining and source of information exchange.
It asserts that, as regimes liberalize, a greater number of political parties provide a diminishing marginal benefit of
information exchange but also incurs an increasing marginal bargaining cost. As such, the hybrid model of these two
countervailing processes expects that the two effects cancel each other out when reaching a maximum equilibrium
point, and thus results in a negative quadratic (inverted-U) relationship between the number of political parties and
the issue diversity of the policy agenda. Although the focus of this article is autocracies, the model is developed by
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