How policies emerge and interact with each other? A bibliometric analysis of policies in China

Chao Zhang and Jiancheng Guan

Science and Public Policy, 2022, vol. 49, issue 3, 441-459

Abstract: Answering how and why policies emerge and interact with one another will advance our understanding of the evolution of policies. The paper investigates policy emergence as a practice defining possible policy objects in a specific domain and policy interaction as a practice enabling the defined objects. To trace the policy evolution, we define three types of citations to describe policymaking processes, establish the citation and co-citation networks of policy documents, and then conduct a natural language processing-based bibliometric analysis. We reveal the patterns of policymaking practices and identify the focal policies in a given domain. The results within the context of Chinese innovation and entrepreneurial policies suggest the information contained in focal policies drives the direction of future policy themes, as well as regular policies, tend to cite focal policies and follow the ideas of focal policies to achieve their goals. Our findings also provide some implications for Chinese future policymaking.

Keywords: innovation and entrepreneurial policies; policymaking process; policy evolution; policy literature reference network; citation analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:scippl:v:49:y:2022:i:3:p:441-459.

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