Whose Voice Matters? Loyalists, Dissidents, and Responsiveness in China

• In Event: Poster Session: Politics of Communist and Former Communist Countries & Critical Political Science
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Politics of Communist and Former Communist Countries

Abstract

Despite lacking electoral incentives, officials in non-democracies provide numerous deliberation channels that respond to citizen grievances. What motivate government responsiveness under dictatorship? Previous studies on authoritarian responsiveness largely contend that autocrats prioritize the requests of potential dissidents. Instead, this paper argues that autocrats strategically maneuver responses of different qualities to different segments of population for social control. Using original data of over 156,000 citizen appeals and government responses on Weibo (Chinese equivalent of Twitter), I show that local officials in China selectively provide substantive responses—responses that resolve the appealed problems—to citizens who demonstrate higher conformity to the regime's surveillance and censorship policies on Weibo. In contrast, officials selectively provide symbolic responses—responses that are rhetorical without solving the problems—to citizen appeals that are more likely to elicit collective action. Using interviews with local officials in East, Central, and West China, I find that officials perform this selective responsiveness primarily to send the signal to petitioners and potential petitioners that compliance, not organized opposition, will open doors for satisfying their demands. These findings suggest the need to re-conceptualize accountability under autocracy not only as a reactive approach to appease opposition, but also as a proactive strategy to cultivate conformity.

Author

• Tongtong Zhang, Stanford University