Rationality and Irrationality in Authoritarian Policymaking: The Role of Events in Legislative Processes in China

The extent to which societal events lead to policy change has been studied extensively. Existing research shows that a complex web of factors shape events related to policy change, including inter alia, the nature of the event, the policy community, media attention, advocacy for change and political support. Current theory development heavily relies on case studies of western democracies. However, much less is known about how societal events shape policy making in non-democratic countries, including China. it is important to better understand event-related policy change in non-democratic countries such as China because the way in which policymakers respond to such events not only affects its own citizens but also can directly and indirectly impact the international community. Due to globalisation and China's growing role in the world, events that happen in China can easily travel elsewhere, as we have recently seen with COID-19, which was first detected in China before spreading elsewhere. But even if crises remain in China, the rest of the world can be affected if an event leads to domestic political instability. as a first step to better understand the rationale behind policy change in China, this research examines national level lawmaking. In particular, it zooms in on the role of societal events. Existing research shows that such events do sometimes trigger or accelerate lawmaking processes in China. However, due to a reliance on a small number of cases, the extent to which such events play a role in lawmaking process remains unclear. the same is true for the driving forces behind such event-related change. This project aims to increase our understanding of event-related policy changes in China through a systematic analysis of legislative histories of all laws passed by the National People's Congress during 2010-2020, using a unique data set of manually collected Chinese language official documents. Through qualitative content analysis, the project aims to identify (a) laws in which events have played a role in terms of agenda setting and final passage, (b) the (type of) events that have played a role in lawmaking process, and (c) the extent to which these are singular of plural events. the findings of this project are relevant for existing policy process theories, including focusing on event literature and the multiple streams framework, especially in terms of the problem stream, agenda setting and policy adoption