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Government responsive selectivity and public limited mediation role in air pollution governance: Evidence from large scale text data content mining

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.resconrec.2022.106553Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Evidence the responsiveness of local government in Non-western electoral system.

  • There is selective characteristics of Chinese government response.

  • Public online participation plays little role in the implementation of regulations.

Abstract

Social media has been widely discussed as an informal way for the public to present their environmental appeals. However, evidence on whether and how the government's decision-making will take the public in the non-Western electoral system under consideration remains limited. In this study, we extracted 9.25 million haze-related posts from Sina Weibo and analyzed the topics using the latent Dirichlet allocation topic model. Furthermore, we provide evidence of the Chinese governments’ responsiveness and the role of online public participation in environmental governance. The results show that the Chinese government responds to the public, both online and offline. Specifically, when online public appeal increases by 1%, the local government's posts on social media increase by 0.347%, and investment and regulations increase by 0.0676% and 0.074%, respectively, in the next phase. However, there are selective characteristics of government response: the local government is more concerned about its “political achievements” than undertaking “governance responsibility.” Furthermore, online public participation plays a minor role in the implementation of regulations.

Introduction

The public plays an important role in environmental governance (Rj et al., 2021; B. Xu et al., 2020). With the rapid development of the Internet, the public can freely express their attitudes and appeals in a timely manner; this has gradually become an informal channel for public participation in environmental governance (Jang and Hart, 2015; Wang and Zhou, 2021, Wang et al., 2016; Zheng et al., 2013). Although the role of public participation has been widely discussed in the Western literature, existing studies have mainly focused on the impact of public participation on environmental governance in Western countries with an electoral system (Zheng et al., 2013). A detailed analysis of the new forms of environmental governance with “Chinese characteristics” is still limited, which will help clarify the tension between the highly centralized political system and citizens’ increasing awareness of their rights. In this study, we take air pollution governance as an example to explore the responsiveness of the government in a country with a top-down non-electoral system and the extent of online public participation in government environmental governance.

However, limited evidence exists on the Chinese selective characteristics of government response (Chai et al., 2014; La and Chai, 2021; Ma et al., 2020). In China, environmental performance assessment is the key factor to encourage the government to carry out environmental governance; however, it may lead local governments to pay too much attention to political achievements but ignore governance responsibility (Shen et al., 2019). Existing studies have pointed out that government responses may be affected by factors such as the channel of expression (Wang, 2018), the degree of information disclosure, policy area, and respondent, and present differentiated characteristics (Tang et al., 2018). The existence of selective responsiveness in China matches its canonical definition in a democratic context. Taking this into consideration, we may be able to address the regional heterogeneity of public environmental satisfaction and bridge the interpretation conflict in the field of environmental governance (UNPAN, 2016).

Extensive research has been conducted on public participation in air pollution control (Tvinnereim et al., 2017; Xu et al., 2018; Zhang, 2018), mainly focusing on the traditional channels of public interest expression (Gao et al., 2021; Qin et al., 2018; Schusky, 1966; F. Xu et al., 2020). In Western democracies, the public can influence policy tendencies of local officials through the “vote by hand” mechanism (Quigley, 2010; Sturm, 2006); residents can threaten local governments by “voting with their feet,” or by directly petitioning government officials to address air pollution (Tiebout, 1956). In China, under the top-down “pressure system” dominated by the central government, utilizing traditional formal channels such as writing environmental protection report letters, petitions, calling the 12,306 environmental protection report hotline, and similar means (Zhang et al., 2019) to influence local governments are resource-intensive. People who have a strong background and rich resources may take advantage of contacting government officials more than those who lack such resources. Therefore, the government tends to take long durations to acknowledge and respond to ordinary citizens’ demands (Hua and Song, 2017; Nathan, 2008).

The development of the Internet not only helps to improve the extent of public participation and promotes the maintenance and expression of public democratic rights, but also helps the government use the democratic potential of the Internet to perform important governance functions and improve the quality of governance in less time (Deng and Peng, 2018; Veltri and Atanasova, 2017). The increasing popularity of the Internet in China appears to compensate for the intensive time and resource requirements of traditional formal channels of participation (Deng and Peng, 2018). Netizens’ concern is also an early warning of social contradictions, which plays a guiding role in the work of the government. Through social media, the public can supervise, pressurize, and promote the government (Nik et al., 2021; Zhang et al., 2018). Compared to electoral democracies, the Chinese regime may follow the public's voice on the Internet because of the fear of collective action by citizens and the need to maintain social stability (Bimber, 1998; Castcls, 2001; Jiang et al., 2019). However, although several recent studies have provided evidence supporting the potential of the Internet to mitigate inequality in civic participation, the extent of online public participation in government environmental governance is still unknown.

To address the above concerns, this study observed over 9.25 million haze-related blogs from 2013 to 2017 from Sina Weibo, a leading Chinese social media platform. The latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic model was used to analyze the various topics of public concern and their time trend. Combined with online and offline multi-source data, this study aims to explore whether and how online public appeals can affect a government's air pollution governance. Specifically, provincial monthly panel data were matched to conduct the empirical analysis and answer the following questions:

  • 1

    Can online public appeals be heard and responded to by the government in China—a country with a top-down non-electoral system?

  • 2

    What is the characteristic of the Chinese government's response༟

  • 3

    Can online public appeals improve the effect of government air pollution governance? How?

The contribution of this study is mainly reflected in the following aspects:

First, in terms of data, compared with other studies that use only the search index or the number of petitions to measure public concern, we consider both online and offline public appeals. The LDA topic model was used to analyze the various topics of online public appeals and their time trends. Owing to China's special political system, it is not pertinent to use media reporting data to reflect public concerns and opinions on air pollution (Wang and Zhou, 2021; Zhang et al., 2018). Although the use of public posts on social media is a good alternative, the number of blogs reflects not only the intensity, but also the breadth of public opinion (Veltri and Atanasova, 2017), providing a new perspective for public participation research.

Second, this study contributes to the literature on government responsiveness in countries with non-Western electoral systems. It shows that the government is responsive and responds to people's concerns expressed on social media regardless of election pressure, which breaks the territorial tendency of Western responsiveness theory and the real impact of people's will on government environmental behavior. In addition, it sheds new light on the relationship between online public participation and environmental governance in the context of government modernization.

Third, this article contributes to expanding the perspective of responsive research. Our findings suggest a form of selective responsiveness in China that matches its canonical definition in a democratic context. The local governments pay more attention to “political achievements” than the call for air pollution governance and “governance responsibility.” This provides an explanation for the heterogeneity in local people's environmental satisfaction and highlights the problems in China's environmental governance.

Finally, we provide new evidence that online public participation in environmental management has not yet taken roots in China, and it plays little role in the actual implementation of policies or regulations. Our results show that network consensus supervision has a significant impact on the environmental governance behavior of local governments, while the role of online public participation in environmental governance is limited. Local governments do not take long-term consideration from the perspective of regional environmental development in the current period and fail to raise the public's environmental rights and awareness to participate in formulating and monitoring the implementation of local regulations.

The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents the theoretical hypotheses. Section 3 presents the data and topic mining process, and Section 4 presents the econometric models. Section 5 presents the empirical analysis and results. Section 6 presents the discussion and main conclusions of the study.

Section snippets

Theoretical hypothesis

Active public participation is essential for eliminating air pollution in China (Wang, 2018). However, according to the classical resource-mobilization theory of political participation, the outcome of personalized expression of interests largely depends on a citizen's own ability and initiatives (Dahl, 2001; Jiang et al., 2019). Resource-rich groups are more likely to be acknowledged by the government through traditional formal political participation channels, which may affect the equality of

Source and measurement of online public appeal

The number of posts reflects the intensity and breadth of online public appeals. Thus, this study used monthly, provincial level, Sina Weibo “ordinary users” haze-related posts as a measure of the online public appeal index. A total of 9.25 million posts from users in different provinces between 2013 and 2017 were analyzed. In addition, the Baidu search index was used as an alternative index to measure online public appeal. The Baidu Index uses keywords as a statistical object, scientifically

Econometric models

Social media platforms allow the public to monitor government behavior, pressure governments, and incentivize the adoption of proactive measures to address air pollution. To explore whether the public's expression of personalized interests in cyberspace can arouse the government's concern and enable it to adopt relevant measures to control air pollution, which means whether the government will respond to the online public appeal, we constructed the following model, as shown in Eq. (1).

Whether online public appeals can be heard and responded to by the government in China?

Table 2 shows the effects of online public appeals on government air pollution governance. Columns (1)–(4) report the results of the online public appeal on government air pollution governance action based on Sina Weibo data. Column (1) presents the effect of online public appeals on online government concerns. The (logged) total volume of online posts is strongly and positively associated with governments’ posts on social media. Specifically, the coefficient indicates that if the public's

Conclusion

The advent of mobile Internet and big data has facilitated China's public participation in environmental protection; its scope is becoming increasingly extensive, and the channel is increasingly diverse with increased impact. However, concrete evidence on whether the government's environmental governance will systematically consider citizens’ online appeals in the absence of formal electoral accountability remains limited. This article addresses this gap by presenting new evidence on the

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Bo Wang: Conceptualization, Writing – review & editing, Project administration. Shuling Xu: Conceptualization, Methodology, Writing – original draft. Kaining Sun: Visualization. Xiqiang Chang: Formal analysis. Zhaohua Wang: Formal analysis, Funding acquisition. Wenhui Zhao: Software, Data curation, Validation.

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

This study is supported by the Beijing Philosophy and Social Science Foundation Project (21GLC057).

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