Cross-Source Corroboration and the Dynamics of Local Government Attention: Evidence from an Emerging Policy Field

Governments receive simultaneous cues from superior authorities, peer jurisdictions, and societal audiences, yet existing research rarely explains how they decide which cues warrant scarce agenda space. We develop a cross-source corroboration perspective on governmental attention and argue that signals become more consequential when they are corroborated by cues from structurally different sources, because convergence reduces ambiguity and makes an issue appear important, legitimate, and actionable. Using Government Work Reports and the Baidu Index to measure attention to digital government, we estimate two-way fixed-effects models for 283 Chinese cities over 2012–2024. We find that superior, peer, and public attention are each positively associated with local attention. The signals also reinforce one another: superior attention strengthens the associations of both peer and public attention with local attention, while peer attention strengthens the association of public attention with local attention. Temporal patterns also differ: the association of superior attention with local attention becomes stronger in the later period, that of peer attention remains broadly stable, and that of public attention tends to strengthen. These findings advance attention-allocation theory by showing that governmental attention is a relational and configurational outcome of signal interpretation rather than an additive response to isolated institutional pressures.