| Summary/Abstract |
In this article, I address the puzzle of what motivates local officials in China to do something new—create a new policy, launch a pilot, adopt an experimental policy—especially when such innovation has uncertain outcomes. Despite the uncertainty and risk, we observe a great deal of policy innovation, both the creation and adoption of experiments, at the subnational level in China. In this article, I explore local policymakers' incentives regarding innovation to understand why they experiment with new policies under conditions of political risk and uncertainty. I utilize data from existing studies on policy innovation, including the Local Gov-ernance Innovation Awards (中國地方政府創新獎), to conduct this analysis.
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