Rational Choice and Institutional Isomorphism: Provincial-level Government's Implementation of the Reforms to Streamline Administration, Delegate Powers, and Improve Regulation and Services and Its Incentives Analysis

The reform to "streamline administration, delegate powers, and improve regulation and services" is the "top priority" and "highlight" of the Chinese government's management innovation in the current national governance modernization. Based on the perspective of inter-provincial comparison, with the reform implementation documents of 9 provinces in China as the cases, the means-ends chain analysis and the text analysis method were used to deeply analyze the overall implementation of the reform to "streamline administration, delegate powers, and improve regulation and services" in China. The study has found that provinces with large differences in resource endowment and development stage have greater "convergence" when it comes to the reform to "streamline administration, delegate powers, and improve regulation and services". Such convergence is a "rational choice" made by the local government, and the logic of this rational choice behavior mainly comes from the joint role played by the mandatory mechanism, imitation mechanism, normative mechanism and competitive mechanism in the institutional isomorphism. In the end, relevant suggestions are proposed from the following four aspects, i. e. in-depth thinking on the essence of the reform, accurately setting the short, medium and long-term goals of reform, exerting the real effect of the reform guarantee mechanism, and having the courage to optimize and bring forth new ideas in the current institutional environment.