Concurrent Implementation and Innovation: Local Government Discourse and Policy Change in China’s Public Rental Housing Policy

• In Event: Policymaking in China

Abstract

Policy process research often portrays local governments as either implementers of top-down mandates or sources of bottom-up innovation, implicitly assuming these roles unfold sequentially over the course of policy change. Under this assumption, local governments either execute centrally initiated policy changes (Fischer, 2014; Miller, 2011) or innovate independently, whether through spontaneous local initiative or centrally authorized experimentation under hierarchy (Benz, 2021; Heilmann, 2008), with successful innovations subsequently scaled by the central government or adopted by peer jurisdictions (Berry & Berry, 1990; Gilardi, 2010; Pierce et al., 2020). In practice, however, local governments may behave in more complex ways, simultaneously executing central directives and reinterpreting them in light of local conditions (Wu, 2020; Xi & Yi, 2026; Xin et al., 2026). How such concurrent behaviors unfold within the same policy change process remains underexplored.

This paper challenges that assumption by examining how local governments enact multiple roles simultaneously during the evolution of China’s Public Rental Housing (PRH) policy. Using discourse network analysis (Leifeld, 2013) of 4,196 newspaper reports from 180 cities (2010–2019), we distinguish top-down (implementation) and bottom-up (innovation) policy discourses by institutional origin and construct parallel city–discourse networks. The results show that policy change is driven by concurrent processes: implementation networks are dense and structurally homogeneous, generating cross-city consensus that informs central policy adjustment; in contrast, innovation networks are sparser and more fragmented, featuring competing coalitions led by larger and more economically developed cities, with only those innovations aligned with central developmental priorities incorporated into subsequent policy change. Local developmental priorities drove both behaviors concurrently, pushing PRH coverage from inclusive toward productive ends.

These findings refine our understanding of policy change in multilevel governance by disentangling overlapping and co-occurring policy processes. Theoretically, they challenge the sequential assumption by documenting that local governments simultaneously implement and innovate within the same policy process. Methodologically, the parallel network approach makes visible forms of policy change that analyses observing local government’s roles sequentially overlook.

Authors

• Zhilin Liu, Tsinghua University
  Non-Presenting Co-Author

• Zinan Xin, Tsinghua University
  Presenting Author