Identifying core policy instruments based on structural holes: A case study of China’s nuclear energy policy

Abstract Policy documents have become increasingly valuable in the field of bibliometrics because they contain important information such as the intentions and behaviors of policymakers. Policy instruments are the central elements of policy documents; therefore, identifying core policy instruments can help researchers in the field better understand the important methodological measures taken by government organizations to achieve specific economic or social goals. However, existing identification methods often focus on the effectiveness of a policy instrument along one dimension (e.g., economic indicators), while ignoring the relationship between individual policy instruments. This paper attempts to fill this gap by designing a network-based framework incorporating structural holes theory to identify the core policy instruments implied in the policy documents. We first identify “policy target-policy instrument” patterns in relevant policy documents and then establish a “policy target-policy instrument” network that maps onto real-world policy systems. Finally, using structural holes theory, we identify core policy instruments and analyze the policy mix system upon this basis. We use China’s nuclear energy policy as a case study to evaluate the proposed approach. Our proposed method is useful for quantitatively analyzing complex policy systems and for identifying core policy instruments and targets within them.