LDA Analysis of Institutional Policy Texts: A Case Study of Regulations on the Protection of Historical and Cultural Cities, Towns, and Villages in China

Against the backdrop of a multi-tiered governance system and increasingly institutionalized norms, China’s historical and cultural preservation policies have long emphasized institutional standardization and hierarchical uniformity. Local policy texts are typically viewed as localized replicas of central institutional logic, overlooking internal variations and differences in information structure. Accordingly, this study examines the Regulations on the Protection of Historical and Cultural Cities, Towns, and Villages issued by 13 provincial-level administrative regions in China. It conceptualizes provincial regulatory texts as institutionalized policy information systems, constructs a cross-regional corpus, and develops a comparative information structure analytical framework based on the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic model. This study operationalizes LDA-derived topic-weight distributions into a comparative analytical framework that captures structural prominence, dispersion, concentration, and priority hierarchy in provincial policy texts. The findings reveal that provincial-level historical and cultural preservation regulations in China exhibit a highly institutionalized information backbone, centered on administrative procedures, legal norms, and macro-level planning controls, and demonstrate significant institutional similarity across provinces. However, within this unified institutional framework, provinces exhibit structural differences in the distribution of thematic weights, information prioritization, and internal textual sequencing, resulting in multiple distinguishable information organization patterns. Consequently, this study highlights the coexistence of formal institutional uniformity and structural differentiation in provincial regulatory texts, providing a more precise basis for understanding variation in local policy expression within China’s historical and cultural governance field.