Policy agendas and regime liberalisation: the case of Hong Kong 1975-2016

Abstract

This thesis considers how political liberalisation, as a dynamic process, affects policy processes in authoritarian regimes. Prior studies observed either the bargaining process or the information exchange process but not both. These studies consider them as two distinct and competing theoretical perspectives. First, the bargaining perspective asserts that the process of political liberalisation, with the introduction of more inclusive and competitive elections, increases the bargaining costs and make policymaking more difficult. Second, political liberalisation increases the social and political freedom and it enhances information exchange that facilitates policymaking. However, these two processes contradict with each other and create a theoretical puzzle that requires a systematic theoretical and empirical investigation.

Building on the punctuated equilibrium theory, this thesis offers a novel bargaining/information exchange hybrid theoretical model to explain policy processes during a period of political liberalisation. Rather than treating the two perspectives as competing explanations, this thesis integrates them by recognising the duality of the electoral system—it is a source of political bargaining as well as a source of information exchange. The liberalisation of the electoral system increases the likelihood of transforming the authoritarian regime from a one-party or one-party-dominant system to a multiparty system. An increased number of political parties in the policy processes intensifies the bargaining process but also increases the information exchange. As such, the changes in bargaining and information exchange processes happen simultaneously as regimes liberalise. The hybrid model contributes to advancement in the field with this refined way of thinking about policymaking during a period of political liberalisation. It captures the complexity and non-linearity of the social and political world.

Using a novel and original time-series dataset of legislative bills of the Hong Kong Legislative Council, the analysis adopts the policy content coding system of the Comparative Agendas Project (CAP) to measure legislative attention from 1975 to 2016. Policy processes are measured by legislative speed (i.e., the duration of the legislative process), distribution of policy change (i.e., changes in policy contents in the legislative bills) and issue diversity of the policy agenda (i.e., the concentration of policymakers’ attention across different policy issues). Political liberalisation is measured by the degree of inclusive and competitive elections, while the number of political parties is measured by the effective number of political parties. This thesis uses stochastic process methods to measure distributions of policy change, determining whether policymaking is characterised by a pattern of mostly stable and occasional periods of rapid and radical policy change. Further, it uses time-series analysis and event history analysis to estimate the impact of the number of political parties on policy processes.

This thesis has a number of important findings. First, an increase in the number of political parties brings in more information and greater bargaining costs. This effectively slows down the legislative process. Second, it finds that the distribution of policy change is punctuated—characterised by long periods of stasis but also a more frequent occurrence of radical changes—rather than incremental change in Hong Kong’s legislative agenda and it confirms the expectation of the punctuated equilibrium theory. However, as the regime liberalises, the distribution of policy change becomes less punctuated, meaning that there are more frequent and moderate policy adjustments. It suggests that a greater number of political parties facilitates policy change and can be explained by the information model. However, comparing Hong Kong’s distribution of policy change with other advanced democracies provides support for the bargaining model. These puzzling findings show a more inclusive bargaining/information exchange hybrid model is needed to explain policymaking in countries with different degrees of political liberalisation. Third, the study of issue diversity of the policy agenda shows an “inverted-U” curve as the number of political parties increases. It implies that autocrats pay more attention to a wider range of policy topics when the number of political parties increases from a low level whereas the attention to different policy topics shrinks when the number of political parties escalates to an extremely high number. The empirical evidence provides unambiguous support for the bargaining/information exchange hybrid model.

Overall, this thesis builds on the punctuated equilibrium theory by offering a novel bargaining/information exchange hybrid model to understand policymaking and tests it systematically with new empirical evidence. It contributes to the understanding of policymaking in authoritarian regimes. It also provides an important insight into the duality of political and other social processes in comparative politics.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Nick Hin-Kin Or: orcid.org/0000-0002-7020-2455

ORCID for William Jennings: orcid.org/0000-0001-9007-8896

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