Policy punctuations and agenda diversity in China: a national level analysis from 1980 to 2019

Based on data sources systematically tracking government activity such as budgets and bill hearings, the Punctuated Equilibrium Theory literature has demonstrated that policy processes in both democracies and nondemocracies feature long periods of stasis interrupted by dramatic changes. However, there is a lack of research that systematically examines China’s policy process. In response, this article introduces a new dataset drawn from China State Council Gazettes from 1980 to 2019 to measure policy punctuations and agenda diversity in China. We find that punctuations in China’s policy process are more intense than those in democracies. The findings further show that China’s policy process features more positive punctuations than negative punctuations. We also find an overall increasing trend of agenda diversity and a pattern of alternation between agenda expansion and concentration across the forty years analyzed in this paper. These findings provide new long-term evidence regarding patterns of policy stability and change in the Chinese context and contribute to our understanding of China’s politics of attention and its linkage with information inefficiency and survival politics.