To join the top and the bottom: the role of provincial governments in China's top-down policy diffusion

Abstract The provincial governments in China and their impact on the policy adoption of county-level administrations remain understudied. This article contributes to the study of policy adoption by dividing the roles enacted by provincial governments into the four following types: subcontractor, pressure-giver, designer, and co-provider. It utilizes the event history analysis method to examine the effects of the four aforementioned roles on policy adoption by county-level governments on the Old Age Allowance Policy (OAAP). The results suggest that provinces playing the roles of designer, co-provider, and pressure-giver exert a significantly more positive impact on the acceptance of the OAAP by their county-level administrations than provinces performing as subcontractors. Meanwhile, the subcontractor-then-designer role exerts a negative influence on the espousal of the OAAP by county-level governments. These findings deliver a new theoretical account of the vertical approach to policy diffusion and offer substantive practical implications for social policy applications in hierarchical societies.