Petition and Repression in China's Authoritarian Regime: Evidence from a Natural Experiment

Abstract

China has established a petition system to elicit information about grievances. However, the petition system may have perverse effects because it also reveals to the center the failure of local-level officials to resolve those grievances. Anecdotal accounts suggest that local officials have incentive to silence petitioners, often with the use of repression. In this article we study whether non-regime threatening petitions would provoke local governments' coercive response. To tackle the endogenous relationship between petition and repression, we take advantage of a natural experiment afforded by a change in hydroelectricity policy in China. In particular, we use provincial hydropower outputs as an instrument to identify citizen petitions. We find that citizen petitions significantly increase a province's spending on its repressive apparatus. The results suggest a paradoxical outcome of China's petition system: while it may help reduce the national authority's use of repression, it has caused an explosion of repression within the authoritarian system as a whole.

Introduction. La participation politique en ligne au révélateur du pétitionnement électronique

“…Panagiotopoulos et T. Elliman (2012), s'appuyant sur une revue des systèmes de pétitionnement mis en place au niveau local, national et européen au Royaume-Uni et en Allemagne dans les années 2000, concluent que, « si ces expériences ont été dans l'ensemble positives, il n'y a pas de preuve solide d'un impact significatif » de ces dispositifs en termes d'action publique (p. 15). On retrouve une conclusion analogue dans des travaux menés plus spécifiquement sur des procédures mises en place au niveau national, que ce soit en Allemagne, où les pétitions papier seraient même mieux entendues que les pétitions électroniques (Escher, Riehm, 2017), en Ukraine (Khutkyy, 2017) ou même en Chine, du fait des risques de répression (Wong, Peng, 2015). La même observation est posée à partir de procédures établies au niveau local à Bristol et Malmö, dont les résultats en matière politique sont présentés comme décevants à tous points de vue (Östling, 2011 ;Zadra, 2020).…”

Familiarity breeds growth: The impact of factional ties on local cadres’ economic performance in China

“…For instance,Wong and Peng (2015) provide evidence from a natural experiment showing that local officials in China often increase expenditure on coercion in order to maintain society stability, which is another hard target.5 Heberer and Trappel (2013), however, point out that the one-item veto is seldom enforced in reality for fear of demoralizing lower officials.6 Wong and Zeng (2018) show that extant works ignore the horizontal dimension of political promotion in China.…”

The Determinants of Anti-Government Protests in Asia

“…However, we still know relatively little about what determines cross-national variations in the extent of anti-government protests in Asia. While there have been important contributions focusing on specific Asian country cases (Cai 2008;Ho 2005Ho , 2015O'Brien 2008;Pekkanen 2004;Wang 2015;Wong and Peng 2015) or investigating how particular issues such as rising food prices (Hendrix and Haggard 2015) or corruption (Yap 2017) affect protest activity globally, few works have attempted to examine the relevance of various political science theories of protests in the historically specific context of Asia. In short, the need for a systematic comparative analysis of the determinants of anti-government protests across the entire Asia has yet to be fulfilled, despite the growing salience and significance of such protests in the region's domestic politics.…”