Resisting Public Monitoring in Autocracies: Evidence from China

• In Event: Chinese Politics Mini-Conference: The Political Economy of State-Business Relations

Abstract

Civic engagement is increasingly popular for Authoritarian regimes to ensure local compliance and address the information dilemma, but it also put extra pressure on local officials. How do local officials respond to such pressures and avoid the public monitoring of civic engagement? With a complete dataset of city-level environmental investigations disclosure and public interest litigations in China, we conduct a generalized Difference-in-Difference analysis and find that the public interest litigation, a new legal channel for social actors to participate in local environmental governance, can significantly reduce the investigation information disclosure in next year. Furthermore, public litigation changes the focus of the investigation, yet it does not increase the total number of investigations: low-profile investigations are significantly increased while the high-profile cases are decreased. Because the local environment investigations are important information sources for public interest litigation, this finding reveals how local officials avoid public monitoring by reducing information disclosure but maintaining the level of policy implementation. It demonstrates the strategies of local officials in coping with the public pressure and indicates that the role of civic engagement in enhancing the accountability of local government in authoritarian regimes is not always as positive as what many studies suggested.

Author

• Dongshu Liu, City University of Hong Kong