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Despite being a key aspect of policy innovation, the mechanisms of occurrence underlying policy reinvention (PR) have received scant scholarly attention. To fill this gap and understand local policy innovation practices in the Chinese context, this study examines the PR of ride-hailing services in China. The outcomes, mechanisms, and tendencies of ride-hailing PR by local governments in China from 2015 to 2022 were examined through similarity calculations, regressions, and content analyses. Findings indicate that variations in ride-hailing PR among Chinese local governments are relatively limited. This finding is mainly attributed to China’s unitary political system, which serves as an important institutional framework that defines the PR decisions of local governments. In particular, PR by local governments is discouraged by internal pressures to respond to higher authorities while being encouraged by local ride-hailing development and horizontal peer competition. In other words, despite their desire to innovate through PR, local governments are restricted by institutional and societal constraints. In addition, these local governments usually implement stricter policies following a PR. Several empirical insights for policy innovation and reinvention research are also provided.
Jiang et al. (Thu,) studied this question.