ArticlePloS one2026
Determinants of policy innovation diffusion in China's provincial sports industry funds: A mixed-methods analysis of strategic adaptation and institutional constraint.
Article in PloS one, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
0 citing papers in PubMed.
No citing paper in PubMed yet.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Existing policy-diffusion theories emphasize economic capacity, market maturity, and intergovernmental pressure, yet these factors may operate differently in specialized industrial policies. This study examines the diffusion of provincial sports industry development funds in China through a mixed-methods design combining discrete-time event history analysis of 31 provincial-level administrative regions from 2006 to 2022 with thematic analysis of 30 stakeholder interviews. The results show that fiscal self-sufficiency and sports lottery sales are positively associated with policy adoption, underscoring the importance of fiscal discretion and policy-specific resources. By contrast, the number of sports enterprises is negatively associated with adoption, contrary to the hypothesized positive relationship and consistent with a tentative compensatory interpretation in which dedicated funds respond to perceived industrial weakness. Administrative pressure is significant in several reduced models but not in the fully specified model, suggesting that national directives shape the institutional context without independently determining provincial adoption timing. Interview findings further reveal how strategic resource allocation, symbolic responses to public demand, formal compliance, and selective policy adaptation mediate the translation of policy conditions into local action. Together, the findings advance a context-sensitive account of diffusion organized around resource specificity, compensatory intervention, and strategic local translation, thereby identifying important boundary conditions of conventional policy-diffusion explanations.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What Socratic holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the Socratic graph.