Attracting the remote emperor's attention: local policy entrepreneurship in China's policy experimentation under hierarchy

作者：Ye, Zhipeng; Wu, Weixu^*

来源：Journal of Asian Public Policy, 2022.

DOI：10.1080/17516234.2022.2083930

• Policy experimentation
• local government
• policy entrepreneurship

Scholars have paid little attention to the mechanisms of locally initiated national policy experiments. This article reveals why some lower-level governments in China can successfully promote bottom-up policy experimentation. With a historical case study of Kunshan, we find that local policy entrepreneurs effectively deploy the nexus of related strategies to attract the central attention. The persistent bottom-up policy experimentation is driven by the interaction between structure-level and actor-level factors through historical evolution, while local economic structure matters for sharping policy entrepreneurs' innovative abilities. This study contributes to unpacking the mechanisms of bottom-up policy experimentation under hierarchy by connecting policy entrepreneurship with experimental governance.

• 单位
  清华大学