Constituency Service Under Nondemocratic Rule: Evidence from China

From Internet to social safety net: The policy consequences of online participation in China

“…This article also contributes to a nascent but rapidly growing literature on nonelectoral responsiveness. Several recent studies have shown that in some non-Western political systems, and China in particular, inquiries and demands made by individual citizens receive replies from governments at a comparable rate as in electoral democracies (Chen et al, 2016;Distelhorst & Hou, 2017), and that individual politicians are generally attentive to citizen opinions (Meng, Pan, & Yang, 2014;Truex, 2016). So far, however, there is still limited evidence on whether, in the absence of formal electoral accountability, the preferences and demands expressed by citizens will be systematically taken into account in government policymaking-a more fundamental criterion of political responsiveness according to the original formulation of this concept (Dahl, 1998;Miller & Stokes, 1963).…”

“…Although government officials in China are often not held electorally accountable to their citizens, existing studies suggest several reasons why citizen participation may still lead to policy changes even in the absence of electoral institutions. Participation may, for example, reveal important information about citizen preferences and local conditions (Distelhorst & Hou, 2017;Lorentzen, 2013), which can be used by an official's superior to evaluate his/her performance. Compared to electoral democracies, the Chinese regime may be even more dependent on information conveyed through channels such as the Internet because of the underdevelopment of more conventional democratic institutions.…”

“…The LLMB is not the only online petition platform available in China. Inspired by the LLMB, many local governments later developed similar platforms to receive and process petitions (for related studies, see Chen, Pan, & Xu, ; Distelhorst and Hou, ). However, because of the concern about censorship and data availability issues (many local platforms do not make petition data publicly available), we focus only on the LLMB for this study.…”

Authoritarian responsiveness: Online consultation with “issue publics” in China

“…Even though public consultation is now commonplace in China, existing scholarship has not demonstrated that the Chinese government alters actual policies in a direction that corresponds to demands articulated in online consultation. Recent studies find that local governments in China are responsive to citizens' grievances (Chen, Pan, & Xu, ; Distelhorst & Hou, , ; Su & Meng, ). However, these scholars measure responsiveness in terms of whether government officials contact complainers in response to their expressed grievances, rather than in terms of real policy change in reaction to citizen input.…”

“…Existing scholarship also does not assess the capacity of authoritarian governments to reach out to their citizens and collect public opinion data prior to making policy decisions. In most studies, which are based on experiments, the authors directly deliver fabricated citizens' messages to the authorities in order to test responsiveness (Chen, Pan, & Xu, ; Distelhorst & Hou, , ). In contrast to existing scholarship, this article benefits from the advantage of the observational settings of the study, in which information is not directly handed to the authorities.…”