Target-oriented policy diffusion analysis: a case study of China’s information technology policy

Current quantitative research on policy diffusion tends to focus on the citation relationship between policies, while ignoring the nature of policy diffusion, that is, the diffusion of policy targets and instruments contained in policy. As a result, the identified policy path is often a hodgepodge, which contains multiple unrelated policies. It also lacks quantitative and reproducible methods for policy diffusion path analysis. Therefore, this paper proposes a policy target-oriented and citation-based policy diffusion analysis framework. Firstly, we collected relevant policy documents. Secondly, the article identified the policy citation relationships and the policy target patterns embedded in the policy documents. Then, we constructed target-oriented policy citation network and analyzed the patterns and characteristics of policy diffusion. Finally, based on the main path analysis method, we identified the policy diffusion paths of the policy mixes in the multi-target case. A case study of China’s information technology policies was used to demonstrate our method’s reliability.