ABSTRACT
In the past two decades, scholars have started to divert their attention to government innovations in China. Nevertheless, it wasn’t until the 2010s that scholars attempt to systematically use empirical data to answer the following question: How and why do local government innovations occur in China? Most previous studies have focused on innovation adoption and extant explanations can be classified into two main categories: internal determinants and external pressures. The internal determinants include macro-level jurisdictional and government characteristics and micro-level policy-makers’ or policy entrepreneurs’ characteristics. The external pressures include vertical top-down or bottom-up mechanisms and horizontal learning, imitation, and competition mechanisms. In Chapter 2, I provide a detailed survey of existing empirical studies on China’s local government innovations. I summarize the theoretical and empirical approaches adopted in the extant literature and point out the major limitations of previous studies. I then propose a new theoretical topic to be explored and explained in this area: the effects of the structural characteristics of bureaucratic organisations on local government innovativeness in China.
