How Does Information Openness Drive Equal Political Participation?

• In Event: Poster Session: Dynamics of Authoritarianism in China & New Research in African Politics
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Dynamics of Authoritarianism in China

Abstract

Equality of civic participation is one of the core values of good governance. Guaranteeing equal engagement of various members of society in governance not only helps to promote inclusive governance but also empowers the disadvantaged groups to overcome the participation gap. The information accessibility brought by digital technologies has profoundly shaped the structure of participation among classes, regions, and generations. However, the political consequences of information openness are not fully understood. Previous literature believe digitalization brings "digital divide", in which inequalities in access to digital technologies reinforce socioeconomic inequalities in real-world. According to digital divide argument, information openness only benefits the advantaged groups and produce more bias participation. We argue the GovTech partnership initiated information openness empowers the disadvantaged groups through lowering the cost of public information access, creating the chance for social learning, and disseminating the scare political knowledge, and thus bridge the participation gap. We examine the argument through a nationwide natural experiment on public information openness which is co-produced by Chinese government and Baidu platform. Based on GovTech partnership to combining both advantages of government and platform company, Baidu Zhidao.Gov integrates both the public information produced by local governments and online communities, and effectively enhancing the capacity of the citizen in accessing, understanding, and utilizing information. This paper firstly develops a framework for understanding the political consequences of information openness, and then combine the big data from digital traces with the representative survey data from multiple nationwide surveys to examine the effect of information openness on equalizing participation gap, and finally discuss its implication for the globe through building GovTech partnership to promote inclusive governance.

Authors

• Tianguang Meng, Tsinghua University

• Siyao Zheng, Tsinghua University