How Offsite Visits by Leaders Affect the Diffusion of Mobile Government Platforms? An Event-history Analysis

Diffusion of policy innovation is essentially the dissemination and diffusion of innovation policy information among governments, thus inter-government relations are the basis for understanding policy knowledge transfer. Based on the dual perspectives of innovation diffusion theory and new institutionalism, this paper empirically tests the relationship between offsite visits and mobile government policy adoption to examine the moderating effects of coercive pressures, imitative pressures, and normative pressures. Using the directed dyadic event-history analysis method, the diffusion effects based on the launch of mobile government platforms in China's provincial governments from 2014 to 2022 are tested. The results suggest that offsite visits have a significant positive effect on the adoption of mobile government platforms. The likelihood of diffusion of mobile government platforms among provinces is positively related to the number of offsite visits. Second, the pressures arising from institutional isomorphism, including the coercive pressures, mimetic pressures, and normative pressures, will strengthen the positive effects of offsite visits on the adoption of policy innovations. Third, the results of a heterogeneity analysis suggest that offsite visits significantly and positively affect diffusion between two provinces with large differences in e-government performance, while the opposite is not significant. Moreover, offsite visits also have a positive impact on diffusion between two provinces in the same metropolitan area. This paper reveals the mechanism of offsite visits on the diffusion of policy innovations and explores the enhancement effects of multiple institutional pressures on this mechanism. The findings enhance an understanding of the learning mechanism on innovation diffusion and provide supporting evidence for an understanding of the policy diffusion effects inspired by leaders' offsite visits.

Our research contributes to the extant literature in three aspects. First, it breaks through the potential theoretical presuppositions of traditional rational and social learning, and it strengthens the theoretical explanatory power of the learning mechanism as the driving force behind the diffusion of policy innovation. Second, it incorporates the study of officials' offsite visits into the framework of policy innovation diffusion, providing a new theoretical perspective and observation point for research on localized policy innovation diffusion. Third, it considers the conditional attributes of the learning mechanism on the diffusion of policy innovation and examines the context in which leaders' offsite visits as a learning mechanism affect the diffusion of policy innovation.