A Study On Diffusion Of Innovation Of Information Policy In Provincial Government In China

Information service and information industry is based on information technology and information resources. As the development of information society, this field has become one of main industries in China. Meanwhile, along with the appearances of more and more informational policies, this topic has become a hot academic issue in the 80s of last century. This dissertation takes the informational policies released by provincial governments as samples, using quantitative analysis to explore the innovative diffusion of information policies in the provincial level. According to the characteristics of the diffusion of information policy in provinces, this article gives advice to governments to release information policies, to promote the development of provincial governments’ information policy construction and informationization level.During the process of informational policies diffusion, their quantity and the distribution data can reflect the effects of diffusion. Briefly, the more and the earlier governments release information polices, the stronger their ability to diffuse information policies. This dissertation newly introduces the concept of "innovation and diffusion index" to quantitatively describe the ability of government to diffuse information policies. Based on what mentioned above, adopting the weighted average method emphasizes the contribution of earlier time to the innovational diffusion index. The governments’ability to diffuse informational policies is influenced by the number of policies and the distribution date. Therefore, when calculating governments’comprehensive innovation and diffusion index, it is necessary to consider the quantity and use weighted average approach to deal with the innovation and diffusion index of the themes and the types of different policies. The result is, the regression analysis between innovation and diffusion index and the informationalization indices of each province in 2013 is obvious, which can prove the usability of innovation and diffusion index.The informational policy samples used in this dissertation come from the open databases in the official websites of provincial governments. The collected policies cover 27 different themes. These informational policies are divided into three types according to the innovation difficulty and diffusion speed, they are:Procedures, Regulations and Planning & Directives. Then adopting the method of Cross Coding, this dissertation gets nine typical themes using. These typical themes can not only be the examples of informational policies, but also indicate their convergence, which manage to reduce the distracted influences caused by various themes. Thus, these nine typical policy themes can be used to evaluate governments’information policies diffusion.This dissertation calculates the provincial governments’innovation and diffusion index from the aspects of information policy theme, information policy type and provincial governments. It can be found that the policy diffusion mode of Planning & Directives is from bottom to top, conversely, the mode of Procedures is from the top to bottom. The governments of Jiangsu Province, Guangdong Province and municipalities show strong abilities to diffuse information policies. However, the governments of Tibet Autonomous Region, Yunnan Province, Ningxia Autonomous Region and other western provinces need to improve this ability. Then, this dissertation gives advices for further development according to different diffusion characteristics of different policy themes.This dissertation has some drawbacks. The reliability test of theme indexing is not enough, the similarities within same policy theme are not explored sufficiently, and maybe there are better approaches to deal with policy distribution date. Meanwhile, three aspects can be done for further researches. First, the concept of "policy cluster" can be proposed to improve the similarity of policies, to calculate the innovation and diffusion index more accurately. Secondly, conducting researches about the contents of policies. Thirdly, building an index system, to evaluate the government’s ability to innovate and diffuse information policy.