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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]

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]