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Policy entrepreneurs play a pivotal role in policy changes in both electoral democracies and authoritarian systems. By investigating the case of healthcare reform in Sanming City, this article illustrates how the fragmented bureaucracy in China enables and constrains local policy entrepreneurs, and how entrepreneurial manoeuvring succeeds in realigning the old institutional structures while attacking the vested interests. Both structural conditions and individual attributes are of critical importance to the success of policy entrepreneurship. Four factors and their dynamic interactions are central to local policy entrepreneurship: behavioural traits, political capital, network position and institutional framework. This study furthers theoretical discussion on policy entrepreneurship by elucidating the fluidity of interactional patterns between agent and structure in authoritarian China. The malleability of rigid institutions can be considerably increased by the active manoeuvring of entrepreneurial agents. (China Q/GIGA)

AbstractThe legitimacy of social policies has gained increasing attention in the past decade, against the backdrop of fiscal austerity and retrenchment in many nations. Policy legitimacy encompasses public preferences for the underlying principles of policies and the actual outcomes as perceived by citizens. Scholarly knowledge concerning the legitimacy of health policy – a major element of modern social policy architecture – is, unfortunately, limited. This article seeks to extend the scholarly debates on health policy legitimacy from the West to Hong Kong, a member of the East Asian welfare state cluster. A bi‐dimensional definition of health policy legitimacy – encompassing both public satisfaction with the health system and the normative expectation as to the extent of state involvement in health care – is adopted. Based on analysis of data collected from a telephone survey of adult Hong Kong citizens between late 2014 and early 2015, the findings of this study demonstrate a fairly high level of satisfaction with the territory's health system, but popular support for government responsibility presents a clear residual characteristic. The study also tests the self‐interest thesis and the ideology thesis – major theoretical frameworks for explaining social policy legitimacy – in the Hong Kong context. Egalitarian ideology and trust in government are closely related to both public satisfaction with the system and popular support for governmental provision of care. However, the self‐interest thesis receives partial support. The findings are interpreted in the context of Hong Kong's health system arrangements, while implications for the territory's ongoing health policy reform are discussed.

SummaryThe private nature of corporate actors does not necessarily preclude them from contributing to public interest. When business strategies and genuine public motivation are favorably aligned, corporate actors from the private sector can also drive public sector innovations. For a private corporation, policy entrepreneurship inherently entails crossing not only the public–private boundary but also various policy domains. This study formulates five propositions to characterize the cross‐boundary strategies of corporate policy entrepreneurship, a distinct form of policy entrepreneurship in a developing authoritarian state. The case study of mobile healthcare payment innovation in China finds that the corporate entrepreneur used a series of cross‐boundary strategies adeptly that eventually made the innovation not only adopted in one locality but also rapidly diffused nationwide. These strategies were not used in isolation or in a pure stepwise fashion but appeared to be recursive and interactive, suggesting the dynamic nature of corporate policy entrepreneurship in a multilevel governance system. More studies could be done to further examine strategies and processes of other forms of policy entrepreneurship in various national and sectoral settings.

SummaryIn the past three decades, "policy entrepreneurship" has emerged as a key analytical concept helping to explain institutional and policy change. Despite this, however, the literature on policy entrepreneurship remains theoretically vexed, producing limited theoretical knowledge or explanatory models able to draw firm conclusions. Theory building on policy and institutional change, for example, how policy entrepreneurs institute and navigate change agendas, using what tools, strategies, resources, and capacities remains opaque. This is especially the case in developing country contexts, where most analytical investigation of policy entrepreneurship has addressed "first world" case examples. This special issue seeks to address this analytical gap in the literature, focusing on cases specific to developing country contexts, deepening our empirical knowledge of policy entrepreneurship in developing countries, but also exploring theoretical and conceptual debates as they relate to developing countries.