Poster #53 - From Disclosure to Action: How Environmental Information Disclosure Shapes Government Priority in China

• In Event: Friday Poster Reception

Abstract

Local governments play a pivotal role in local policymaking and implementation, with their agendas shaped by how they prioritize competing policy issues. In China, local governments act as the middle layer of a “sandwich,” navigating bottom-up demands from citizens and top-down pressure from the central government. Understanding how these forces shape local government prioritization is essential for explaining variation in policy outcomes.

This study investigates how bottom-up public demand and top-down pressure from the central government influence local government priorities, particularly in the context of performance information disclosure. In 2013, China launched a groundbreaking program to monitor air quality and disclose real-time data. This project increased public concern over environmental issues and enhanced central government’s ability to access real local performance, creating dual pressures for environmental improvement. The staggered rollout of the program across cities provides a quasi-experimental framework for causal inference.

Using a panel dataset of 306 prefecture-level cities from 2009 to 2017, this study quantifies local government attention to environmental issues through text analysis of annual government work reports. A difference-in-differences analysis reveals that local governments significantly increased their attention on environmental issues following the policy change, highlighting the role of transparency in shaping governance. The magnitude of this shift varies based on local conditions: cities with higher public environmental concern (stronger bottom-up demand) and worse air quality (greater top-down pressure) showed larger changes, providing robust evidence for the influence of both bottom-up and top-down mechanisms.

Further heterogeneity analysis shows important conditions for mechanisms. The bottom-up mechanism is significant only in politically sensitive cities, those with a higher frequency of labor strikes, suggesting that public pressure is more effective where local governments perceive higher risks of social instability. The top-down mechanism remains significant only in cities with stronger economic performance, indicating local governments’ strategic trade-off between environmental and economic priorities.

These findings underscore the complexity of government prioritization and conditional responsiveness of local government to bottom-up and top-down pressures. While transparency can increase policy prioritization and dual pressures service as critical mechanisms for this transparency effect, its effectiveness depends on local governance contexts. In contrast to the vast literature focusing on intra-organizational factors of prioritization, this study demonstrates that local governments strategically allocate their attention in response to interactions with multiple stakeholders.

Author

• Zhouling Bai, University of Hong Kong
  Presenting Author