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According to the existing literature on public management, many factors affect popular satisfaction with the government (referred to as "government satisfaction"), one of which is the use of e-government. Particularly, many e-government proponents regard increasing government transparency as an important way to improve government satisfaction. To test the validity of this assertion, this paper uses an Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression model to analyze survey data on individuals' e-government usage frequencies in China and their satisfaction with the local government during the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that people can rationally and consciously evaluate governments and make decisions by using the government performance information that they know about. This conscious and rational process is also mixed with the impact of some irrational and emotional factors, which is consistent with the concept of the "framing effect." This paper identifies local government transparency as the mediating variable in the relationship between the use of e-government and government satisfaction and public knowledge of local government performance in COVID-19 outbreak control as the moderating variable in the relationship between local government transparency and government satisfaction. Since the mediating effect of local government transparency is significantly different from those of overall and central government transparency, government transparency at different levels plays a role of the above-mentioned "frame." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior studies regard responsiveness as an effective institution for Chinese government to mitigate social protests based on the premise that citizens adopt more institutionalized channels as soon as the regime makes it available. We challenge this notion by arguing that institutionalized and noninstitutionalized channels are not substituting but complements, and improving responsiveness to institutionalized participation may ironically lead to more protests. We collected a unique dataset and employed machine-learning to measure the quality of local responsiveness. We find that improving responsiveness has a positive effect on protests and identify updating citizens' beliefs on repression as major mechanism. The findings suggest the availability of new institutionalized channels may not have the intended substitutive effects on noninstitutionalized participation, and thus authoritarian co-optation could have unintended consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Are citizens' attitudes towards government's effort to fight corruption primarily shaped by social information (such as public media and political knowledge) or direct personal experience of corruption? Using a list experiment embedded in national survey to measure corruption experience in China, this paper provides a nuanced comparison of these two factors. Compared with social information, the experience of corruption enhances the perceived corruption while reduces the positive evaluation on government's anti-corruption effort. However, regarding public feedback to anticorruption endeavours, the effect of corruption experience could be mitigated by people's satisfaction on basic public services provision. The findings suggest that individuals' evaluation of anti-corruption campaign is very utilitarian. When people obtains better public services from government, they are more likely to enhance positive evaluation of anti-corruption performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The link between geographical leadership mobility and policy isomorphism is rarely discussed in the extant literature. We argue that the geographical leadership mobility encourages local executives to converge their development experiences in their original working jurisdictions and their current positions. The distinct Chinese political personnel system provides an ideal environment that allows researchers to examine the isomorphic effects of geographical leadership mobility. This research builds a dataset of local social spending between 1998 and 2011 as well as a database of the leadership mobility history of provincial executives in China. Results of the spatial panel analysis (SPA) demonstrate that the geographical leadership mobility (i.e., horizontal, top‐down, and bottom‐up) of governors stimulates the regional isomorphism of provincial education and health care spending. The empirical findings affirm the effectiveness of the effort of the Chinese central government in narrowing the regional inequality of social welfare provision through the geographical mobility of local leadership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research suggests that economic inequality reduces political trust after the public recognizes the inequality and perceives it as a failure of the political system in Western democracies. This study challenges this presumed "output evaluation model" (OEM) both theoretically and empirically. We provide an alternative mediator evaluation model (MEM) contending that objective inequality affects political trust through government-performance mediators, without requiring accurate public perception of inequality or specific regime types. With nationwide economic inequality and public opinion data from China, we examined both the OEM implication and four MEM mechanisms through impartial governance, responsiveness, judicial fairness, and anti-corruption efforts. Findings indicate that the mediating mechanisms, rather than direct inequality, shape political trust, with robust evidence even after addressing endogeneity. This study broadens the understanding of the intricate relationship between systemic conditions and individual perceptions, offering significant insights into the dynamics of trust in political institutions in a general sense. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Internet‐based platforms are increasingly being used by governments around the world to facilitate public engagement with citizens. However, it remains an open question whether participation through these platforms can actually enable citizens to influence policies. We address this question by studying the patterns and consequences of online participation at a major electronic petition platform in China, a country with the world's largest Internet‐using population. Content analysis of over 900,000 petitions reveals that a substantial share of them concern lower‐class issues and are originated from less developed rural and suburban areas. Linking variations in petition volumes to an original data set of government policy priorities, we further show that online participation led governments to place greater emphasis on social welfare policies and to increase the coverage of a key low‐income assistance program. These results underscore the potential of online participation as an important mechanism to improve the quality of governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An increasing number of scholars have established that authoritarian regimes employ quasi-democratic institutions as part of their efforts to retain power. However, we know little about the potential variation among institutions providing citizens with opportunities for voice and the conditions under which such institutions are true channels of responsiveness. In this article, we develop and test the concept of "receptivity''' that is, whether autocrats are willing to incorporate citizen preferences into policy, using a list experiment of 1,377 provincial-and city-level leaders in China. Contrary to expectation, we find that leaders are similarly receptive to citizen suggestions obtained through either formal institutions or the Internet unless they perceive antagonism between the state and citizens, in which case receptivity to input from the Internet declines, while receptivity to formal institutions remains unchanged. Our findings show that whether quasi-democratic institutions are mere window dressing or true channels of responsiveness depends on the perceived quality of state-society relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An increasing number of scholars have established that authoritarian regimes employ quasi-democratic institutions as part of their efforts to retain power. However, we know little about the potential variation among institutions providing citizens with opportunities for voice and the conditions under which such institutions are true channels of responsiveness. In this article, we develop and test the concept of "receptivity," that is, whether autocrats are willing to incorporate citizen preferences into policy, using a list experiment of 1,377 provincial-and city-level leaders in China. Contrary to expectation, we find that leaders are similarly receptive to citizen suggestions obtained through either formal institutions or the Internet unless they perceive antagonism between the state and citizens, in which case receptivity to input from the Internet declines, while receptivity to formal institutions remains unchanged. Our findings show that whether quasi-democratic institutions are mere window dressing or true channels of responsiveness depends on the perceived quality of state-society relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The widespread use of information and communication technology (ICT) has reshaped the public sphere in the digital era, making online forums a new channel for political participation. Using big data analytics of full records of citizen-government interactions from 2008 to early 2014 on a nationwide political forum, we find that authoritarian China is considerably responsive to citizens' demands with a rapid growth of response rate; however, government responsiveness is highly selective, conditioning on actors' social identities and the policy domains of their online demands. Results from logistic and duration models suggest that requests which made by local citizens, expressed collectively, focused on the single task issue, and are closely related to economic growth are more likely to be responded to. These strategies adopted by Chinese provincial leaders reveal the scope and selectivity of authoritarian responsiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three main opposing camps exist over how social capital relates to population health, namely the social support perspective, the inequality thesis, and the political economy approach. The distinction among bonding, bridging, and linking social capital probably helps close the debates between these three camps, which is rarely investigated in existing literatures. Moreover, although self-rated health is a frequently used health indicator in studies on the relationship between social capital and health, the interpersonal incomparability of this measure has been largely neglected. This study has two main objectives. Firstly, we aim to investigate the relationship between bonding, bridging, and linking social capital and self-rated health among Chinese adults. Secondly, we aim to improve the interpersonal comparability in self-rated health measurement. We use data from a nationally representative survey in China. Self-rated health was adjusted using the anchoring vignettes technique to improve comparability. Two-level ordinal logistic regression was performed to model the association between social capital and self-rated health at both individual and community levels. The interaction between residence and social capital was included to examine urban/rural disparities in the relationship. We found that most social capital indicators had a significant relationship with adjusted self-rated health of Chinese adults, but the relationships were mixed. Individual-level bonding, linking social capital, and community-level bridging social capital were positively related with health. Significant urban/rural disparities appeared in the association between community-level bonding, linking social capital, and adjusted self-rated health. For example, people living in communities with higher bonding social capital tended to report poorer adjusted self-rated health in urban areas, but the opposite tendency held for rural areas. Furthermore, the comparison between multivariate analyses results before and after the anchoring vignettes adjustment showed that the relationship between community-level social capital and self-rated health might be distorted if comparability problems are not addressed. In conclusion, the framework of bonding, bridging, and linking social capital helps us better understand the mechanism between social capital and self-rated health. Cultural and socioeconomic factors should be considered when designing health intervention policies using social capital. Moreover, we recommend that more studies improve the comparability of self-rated health by using the anchoring vignettes technique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: We investigate relationship between social capital and self-rated health (SRH) in urban and rural China. Using a nationally representative data collected in 2005, we performed multilevel analyses. The social capital indicators include bonding trust, bridging trust, social participation and Chinese Communist Party membership. Results showed that only trust was beneficial for SRH in China. Bonding trust mainly promoted SRH at individual level and bridging trust mainly at county level. Moreover, the individual-level bridging trust was only positively associated with SRH of urban residents, which mirrored the urban–rural dual structure in China. We also found a cross-level interaction effect of bonding trust in urban area. In a county with high level of bonding trust, high-bonding-trust individuals obtained more health benefit than others; in a county with low level of bonding trust, the situation was the opposite. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

National identity is the cognition of citizens regarding to which political community they belong, and the tendency to accept the political, cultural and ethnic values of the state. Previous studies have found that national identity is heterogeneous at the subnational levels. Why do people hold different degrees of nationalism and patriotism in the subnational units? In this paper, we offer a political economic explanation of national identity, which links the state capacity with political attitudes. We employ a nationalism-patriotism framework to decompose the concept of national identity, then use the supervised learning approach to measure nationalism and patriotism based on a massive number of Weibo posts dating from 2011 to 2017. Automated text analysis shows that the state capacity plays an important role preventing the national identity from being weakened by globalization and the diversity of social information. Specifically, with the progress of China's globalization, multiculturalism and various information have crossed the national boundaries, which undermines China's national identity. In order to maintain this identity, the Chinese government utilizes its redistribution capacity to reinforce both nationalism and patriotism, and also its information capacity to strengthen nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates popular conceptions of democracy and its underlying factors in China. Democratic conceptions among Chinese citizens have long been debated, with most concluding that economic welfare and government performance dominate how the Chinese view democracy. This article offers a different picture, with new evidence drawn from text data. By employing the structural topic model to analyze the responses to open-ended questions from three waves of the Asian Barometer Survey between 2008 and 2015, this article delineates four democratic conceptions prevalent among the Chinese populace, namely ‘Political Participation’, ‘Political Rights’, ‘Consultative Decision-making’ and ‘Socioeconomic Performance’. The analysis shows that political participation has become the most prominent conception, closely followed by political rights. This finding suggests a shift in the Chinese interpretation of democracy, aligning more closely with western procedural notions while still retaining distinct Chinese characteristics. In addition to rising demands for freedom and equality, informed respondents ask for deeper involvement in public affairs and higher inclusion in the decision-making process. These trends underscore the necessity for the Chinese authorities to more effectively address public demands, especially in the context of the ongoing endeavor to cultivate China’s new model of whole-process people’s democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• We investigate how public opinion and superiors' order influence local budget-making in China. • A survey experiment involving 3059 local officials was implemented and treatment effects were identified. • When exposed to superiors' orders only, officials might selectively obey those for investment but ignore those for welfare. • When public opinion conflicts with superiors' order, local officials might choose to respond to local citizens. • Local officials' policy preferences have a strong impact on their policy decisions. Responding to public opinion is a fundamental function of the modern state. While numerous empirical studies have examined the opinion-policy link in the context of democracies, few have explored policy responsiveness in authoritarian countries and we know little about how local governments make policy decisions when the citizens' preferences conflict with the directives of the superiors. Drawing on a survey experiment involving 3059 local officials in China, this study examines whether superiors' priorities and citizens' opinions have an impact on fiscal decision-making and how officials react to contradictory preferences between their superiors and the local public. Using randomized treatments that provide different scenarios across the samples, we find that local officials selectively comply with superiors' directives and local citizens' opinions. On the one hand, local officials would follow superiors' directive for economic investment but might ignore those for welfare provision; on the other hand, they tend to respond to public opinion in a limited but significant fashion when the citizens' preferences conflict with the superiors' priorities. Moreover, the statistical results suggest that local officials' policy preferences have a strong impact on their policy decisions. These findings help us to understand the behavior of local officials and highlight their roles in devising fiscal policies that foster local development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares government-led agenda and public-led agenda setting during the COVID-19 pandemic in China to investigate whether or not the pandemic enhances the government's role in agenda setting. Within-case comparison, aided by big data analysis and case study, finds an overall public-led pattern of agenda setting in China, and a mixture of government-led and public-led agenda setting during the pandemic. It is also found that Chinese government bodies pay attention to and are responsive to citizens' emotions expressed through social media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]