Understanding the Evolution of Government Attention in Response to COVID-19 in China: A Topic Modeling Approach

Abstract

The effective control over the outbreak of COVID-19 in China showcases a prompt government response, in which, however, the allocation of attention, as an essential parameter, remains obscure. This study is designed to clarify the evolution of the Chinese government’s attention in tackling the pandemic. To this end, 674 policy documents issued by the State Council of China are collected to establish a text corpus, which is then used to extract policy topics by applying the latent dirichlet allocation (LDA) model, a topic modelling approach. It is found that the response policies take different tracks in a four-stage controlling process, and five policy topics are identified as major government attention areas in all stages. Moreover, a topic evolution path is highlighted to show internal relationships between different policy topics. These findings shed light on the Chinese government’s dynamic response to the pandemic and indicate the strength of applying adaptive governance strategies in coping with public health emergencies.

Characterizing the Dynamic Evolution of Interagency Collaborative Decision-Making Networks in Response to COVID-19 in China: A Policy Document Analysis

“…Regarding COVID-19, a considerable number of studies have paid attention to emergency response polices against COVID-19, and most of them employed quantitative and qualitative document analysis methods in the policy research. Some studies have focused on the evolution of COVID-19 emergency management policies during the control and prevention periods by using some topic modeling methods [ 1 , 8 ]. Except for quantitative analysis, researchers also have qualitatively analyzed COVID-19 control polices from the document perspective.…”

“…In this regard, combating COVID-19 requires policymakers to shift their attention in time to adapt to a rapidly changing pandemic situation. Thus, the effective control over outbreaks of COVID-19 hinge on adaptive government responses [ 8 ].…”

“…When we pay attention to China’s policies against COVID-19, it is easy to see that most of them are issued by multiple government agencies. Furthermore, the Chinese government’s attention on emergency management was adjusted as the pandemic evolved [ 8 ], which can help us identify the dynamic evolution path of interagency decision-making networks in public health emergencies.…”

“…Policy documents are the carriers of policy, which implicitly reflect policymakers’ ideologies and provide a channel to observe the policy process [ 16 , 17 ]. Moreover, the policy document analysis method has been widely used in research on prior public health emergencies [ 18 , 19 ] as well as COVID-19 [ 1 , 8 ]. For example, Wu et al (2021) applied policy document analysis to characterize the patterns of China’s policies against COVID-19 [ 1 ].…”

“…For example, Wu et al (2021) applied policy document analysis to characterize the patterns of China’s policies against COVID-19 [ 1 ]. Cheng et al (2021) used policy document analysis to assess the evolution of Chinese central government attention in response to COVID-19 [ 8 ]. Therefore, the policy document analysis method can be used not only to identify the policy topics, but also to analyze the evolution of policies.…”