Panel Paper: Reposition the Role of Media in Policy Process in an Era of Rapid Change: Evidence from Chinese Drug Regulation

Tuesday, July 30, 2019
40.006 - Level 0 (Universitat Pompeu Fabra)

*Names in bold indicate Presenter

DONG Guo and Mingshuai He, Tsinghua University


In recent years, a trend in Chinese drug regulation arises. Illegal behavior in production and sale of drug or health care products is increasingly exposed and discussed on social media such as Sina-Weibo and Wechat-Subscriptions before it come into view of legacy media and goes into formal policy agenda. We called the regulation power on social media as the power of guerrilla, compared with that of regular army owned by legacy media like newspaper. Despite restrictions from formal institutions, the participation of social media in exposing social problems has changed the ways through which the informal institution could influence public opinions and public policies.

In this study, we take four China’s cases of Drug Regulation in 2018 to reposition the role of media in policy process in an era of rapid change. In these cases, legacy media (regular army) usually chooses to follow up after the information arousing the interest of the public provided by social media (guerrilla), which has become a new policy agenda model especially in China. However, only half of the cases in which the relevant companies got severe punishment, while others are not. Furtherly, we find that even if the companies with illegal behaviors faced the pressure from the unity of those two kinds of media power, the ambiguity of product nature and the neutrality of local regulations are two important factors that affect the probability whether they could be punished eventually.

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