The impact of policy collaboration networks and policy topic networks on policy diffusion: Empirical evidence from the energy field

Policy networks have strong explanatory power for policy processes and policy results. Previous studies have proven the importance of the role played by policy collaboration networks. Recently, the value of policy topic networks has gradually been revealed. However, there has been a lack of interpretation of policy results through topic network characteristics. Therefore, a comparative research framework for policy collaboration and topic networks is proposed. Based on a search and screening results for China's energy policies, we construct a policy collaboration network composed of policymaking agencies and their collaborations and a topic network composed of policy topics and their co-occurrences. After analysing the characteristics of institutions and topics, we empirically test hypotheses concerning the relationship between the network characteristics of these two networks and policy diffusion in China. We find that in policy collaboration networks, the centrality of agencies has a positive effect on the degree of policy diffusion and the structural holes of agencies exert an inverted Ushaped effect on the degree of policy diffusion. In the topic networks, policy topics with high centrality have a greater degree of policy diffusion and the structural holes of topics are not significantly associated with policy diffusion.