Research On The Paths Of Policy Agendas Triggered By Food And Drug Safety Focus Events

Food and drug safety is one of the implementations of the lives of the people’s health,improving the food and drug regulatory policy provides a legal guarantee for the food and drug safety.Past food and drug safety incidents,not only exposed loopholes in regulatory policy,but also contributed to the relevant policies promulgated.As an important form of triggering policy agenda,focus events have been widely concerned by scholars.Studying what elements of focus events can trigger policy agenda setting and exploring its triggering path is helpful to better understand the logic of setting policy agenda in our country in the current era.This paper is based on Gerston’s policy agenda trigger mechanism and Wang Shaoguang’s "external pressure model".By introducing 24 food and drug safety focus events involved in the "China Internet Public Opinion Analysis Report" from 2008 to2020.With the help of qualitative comparative analysis methods,from the three dimensions of event attributes,public media opinions and government.A total of seven conditional variables,including public opinion heat,the scope of influence,event repetition,mainstream media coverage,concentration of public opinion,policy fields and specific interest demands,are selected for qualitative comparative analysis.The results show that: The consensus of public opinion on the focal events and the reflection of specific people’s interest demands are the necessary prerequisite for the focal events of food and drug safety to trigger the policy agenda.Moreover,"specific interest demands" and "concentration of public opinions",together with other sufficient conditions constitute the three combination paths for the food and drug safety focus events to trigger the policy agenda.It can be seen that on the one hand,the government will take the initiative to improve the gaps or defects in some policy areas by taking advantage of social problems presented by focal events.On the other hand,the government’s response to focal events presents a typical "pressure-response" pattern.In addition,this paper also attempts to study the main reasons for the failure of focus events from the direction that the focus events on food and drug safety did not trigger the policy agenda,so as to make supplementary explanations for this study.