Multiple Streams of Decision-Making: China’s Post-COVID Revision of the Infectious Diseases Law

The Multiple Streams Framework (MSF), originally developed to explain agenda-setting in the U.S., has been extended to examine decision-making. However, in its current shape, this extension has limited explanatory power in non-democracies. In response, this paper critically reviews existing MSF propositions pertaining to decision-making and develops hypotheses about the drivers and obstacles of policy adoption in China, which are tested through a case study of the amendment process of China’s Infectious Diseases Prevention and Control Law in response to COVID-19. Despite the urgency brought by the pandemic, which led to the amendment’s inclusion in the legislative agenda in early 2020, the law’s adoption took five years. This article seeks to uncover the reasons behind this unexpectedly slow process. To do so, we rely on a novel dataset of Chinese legislative records, policy documents, journal articles, and news articles. Our findings shed light on the role of problem definition, inter-agency conflicts, and diminished political backing in impeding decision coupling. By applying the MSF to the decision-making phase in a China-specific context, we contribute to theoretical development and offer new insights into the dynamics of policy processes in authoritarian settings.