Spatial Political Economy of Participation in China: Evidence from a Mega City

• In Event: Politics of Place and Space

Abstract

How does space affect political participation? Extant studies largely attribute unequal participation to individual-level factors, such as income, education, SES, and race. In contrast, this article aims to examine participation at the aggregate level, or more specifically how participation is spatially structured. This article investigates three forms of spatial inequality, including economic gaps, unbalanced government inputs, and development levels, and then estimates their impacts on political participation. Instead of using survey data like most previous studies, this article collects a new dataset measuring political participation: citizens’ requests from the 12345 Citizens’ Service Hotline of a megacity in China. Combined with pre-owned home prices, government spending data, and geographic information, this article employs spatial analysis techniques to reveal the spatial structure of participation. First, as for economic gaps, this article proposes two dimensions of spatial economic inequality: within-inequality and cross-inequality. The former indicates the degree of inequality within a community, while the latter measures how rich/poor a community is compared to its neighbors. Results show that the richness of a community alone does not significantly contribute to higher political participation. In contrast, within-inequality leads to more involvement of citizens in public affairs; more specifically, a more economically divided community is more likely to witness higher participation. Cross-inequality also affects citizens’ behavior. No matter how poor or rich a community is, when it is surrounded by a rich community, citizens living in that area are more likely to participate. Second, government inputs also influence participation in a significant way. With rising government spending on programs that benefits society, citizens become even more demanding. As opposed to the negative feedback loop between government actions and citizens’ preferences proposed by the thermostatic model, this article presents a totally different image with a positive linkage. Third, this article studies how the geography of development affects political behavior. Communites examined in this article are categorized into three groups based on their levels of development, including the core, semi-periphery, and periphery. Results indicate that citizens living in the semi-periphery, or in other words new urbanized areas, have become significantly more motivated and engaged in public affairs compared to their fellows living in the core and periphery. Mechanisms behind the above aggregate-level findings are also discussed, although not directly examined, in this article. As an attempt of interrogating the political and economic structure of participation, this article offers new explanations with empirical evidence showing how different forms of inequality impact politics spatially.

Authors

• Tianguang Meng, Tsinghua University

• Yu Yan, Beijing Normal University