Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - RESPONSIVENESS (The Microfoundations of Authoritarian Responsiveness: E-Participation, Social Unrest and Public Policy in China)

Teaser

\"China’s success story of the past three decades is seen as an anomaly. Market-based reforms have generated an economic system that can hardly be described as socialist anymore, but the Communist Party of China remains in power. Although social unrest is on the rise, the CCP...

Summary

\"China’s success story of the past three decades is seen as an anomaly. Market-based reforms have generated an economic system that can hardly be described as socialist anymore, but the Communist Party of China remains in power. Although social unrest is on the rise, the CCP enjoys the consent of the overwhelming majority of its people. Most agree that China’s economic performance is the key to solving this apparent puzzle, but how can extraordinary high rates of public support be maintained in a country where income inequality is so extreme?

We believe that the answer to this question lies in the responsiveness of China’s authoritarian one-party regime to popular demands and grievances, a capability that has so far been attributed only to democratic regimes. We further believe that the rapid improvement of e-participation, the opportunity to evaluate public services on the Internet, has greatly facilitated regime responsiveness. A little studied aspect in online engagement is that citizens in China frequently use the Internet to criticize the government\'s performance in providing public goods without, however, demanding a regime change. Such information is vital to authoritarian rulers, because regime stability in authoritarian regimes frequently hinges on \"\"performance legitimation\"\", i.e. increasing the material well-being of the people. Local authorities in China are actively seeking such information, and even publish complaints and the government’s responses online to ensure people that they are taken seriously. We hypothesize that online criticism is used to monitor local officials, formulate policies, and thereby improve regime performance. We suggest, however, that as the government increasingly calibrates public policy towards satisfying the demand of China’s netizens, the \"\"technologically illiterate\"\" are forced to express their demands in public protests and other forms of social unrest.

The project applies a mix of three methods, whose strengths complement each other very well. The first is automated information extraction. Rich empirical data exists for the three core variables of the project, but it is unstructured. Supervised machine learning will help us to classify this data. This allows us to map trends across space and time, and to provide first cautious hints regarding the relationship between the variables of interest. Fine-grained analysis to this extent has been completely impossible in previous research. Second, to address the widely recognized problem of most “big data” analysis being atheoretical, we conduct non-participant field studies. In a third step, the theoretical model derived from the field studies and the exploratory data analysis will be tested with the help of advanced statistical methods.

China is considered one of the most advanced autocracies with respect to managing the Internet. This allows us to explore processes that have not yet taken place in other authoritarian regimes. The project sheds light on the intended and unintended consequences of enhanced e-participation in China by exploring which social interests China’s rulers incorporate into public policy making, and how these decisions influence the propensity of particular social groups to voice their demands by either participating online or taking to the streets. On a practical level, China’s global importance makes it necessary to assess its stability, especially now that economic growth is slowing. China is the world’s largest trading nation and is on its way to becoming a regional hegemon, and a major regime crisis would have global implications. It is worth noting that China’s per capita income and Internet access rate are similar to those of Egypt and Tunisia, both of which experienced regime breakdowns after massive social uprisings in 2010.\"

Work performed

In the first stage of the project, we created what will constitute the largest public database on local government in China. The data we collected includes millions of online complaints in dozens of cities and counties, millions of government documents, and information on thousands of protests. Much of the work done consisted of identifying suitable data and writing software to download, clean and store the data in databases. Using cutting-edge machine learning algorithms, we transform textual information into categories that can be analysed statistically. For example, we can now trace the growth or decline of certain grievances across space and time, visualise protest activity, and measure the repression rates of different kinds of protests. Our data also provides insights into what kinds of online complaints are resolved to the complainants\' satisfaction, ans what kinds of issues leave users dissatisfied. We are currently training an Artificial Neural Network to detect broad changes in sentiment among those who complain to the government.

In addition, we conducted field research to find out how complaint platforms operate, and how leaders prioritize public inputs. We traced the path of online complaints after submission by Chinese citizens, explored their effect on internal discipline and the provision of public services, and explored what lessons leaders draw from recurring grievances. Finally, we gained valuable insights into how local propaganda departments, bureaus responsible for citizen petitions, and supervisory organs operate and interact. Our field research has taken us to all parts of China, where we observed the operation of online complaint platforms and asked political leaders, department heads, bureaucrats and complainants if and what effect online complaint systems have had on their lives.

The fieldwork and initial analysis of the data allowed us to formulate tentative answers to three major questions.

The first question is whether the Chinese authorities take online complaints seriously, and if government responsiveness affected individuals’ propensity to engage in street protest. The answer to the first part of the question is yes. There is ample evidence that online complaints are being used to monitor the work of public service providers. In all localities we visited, responsiveness to online complaints is a part of the year-end evaluation of department leaders. We have found evidence that leaders are disciplined following investigations triggered by online complaints, and that this has created pressure which is passed on to street level bureaucrats and service personnel. We heard credible stories of overwork, and observed a marked decline in morale especially among low rank officials. We found little evidence, however, that the volume and content of complaints have any effect on public policy formulation. Although the officials who manage complaint platforms write regular reports to local leaders, those reports do not seem to affect laws and regulations.

As to the second part of the question, we found that online complaints and protests serve different constituencies. As a general trend, there is an inverse relationship between issue frequencies in complaints and protests. Based on indicators such as complainant satisfaction and repression rates in popular protest, we were also able to establish that the government tends to be more responsive to those issues that affect the middle classes, while not being responsive to the demands and grievances of marginalized groups such as farmers and the victims of urban redevelopment. Popular protests have been portrayed by scholars and the media alike as major threats to social stability in China. We arrived at some surprising findings that challenge this assumption. Most protests are so small that they can be - and are - ignored by government officials. In that sense, a protest does not necessarily constitute a challenge, but can also signal the absence o

Final results

We have found that consultation in the form of online complaints plays an important role in China\'s governance. Although the regime cracks down hard on all kinds of dissent, it is responsive especially to the demands of the urban middle class. Online consultation is used extensively to monitor public service providers and enhance government performance, especially where it concerns quality-of-live issues like public transport, noise pollution, and public hygiene. Although seemingly trifle, China\'s urban middle class seems to welcome these improvements. Hence, our results illustrate that the Internet can be beneficial for hard authoritarian regimes if the rulers identify common ground with the urban middle class. Recent research does recognize the stabilising function of the Internet for authoritarian regimes, but mostly focusses on surveillance and repression. We can show, however, that cooptation is an important stability-enhancing factor as well.

We also moved beyond the state of the art in the research on popular protests in China. Up to now, studies on protests, demonstrations, strikes and other forms of social unrest in China have overwhelmingly studied the phenomenon from a micro perspective. Little was known about how protests in China are distributed temporally and spatially, which grievances they address, how many people they involve and how likely they are to meet with repression. The project provided novel insights into to these issues. Among others, we found that, contrary to the commonly held assumption that protests are largely non-violent, violent repression is in fact common. We also found that protesters by homeowners, who can be considered members of the Chinese middle class, have risen steeply since 2013. This has important ramifications for regime stability in China.

Finally, the project has contributed to enhancing our knowledge on the quality of protest event data for authoritarian regimes. Christoph Steinhardt, a colleague at the University of Vienna, and myself examined the quality of different sources of protest event data for China. We examined coverage and bias of different media sources for nearly 2.500 protest events in three Chinese metropolises. Specifically, we assessed the quality of social media, English-language news media, Chinese-language news media from Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macao, dissident media and domestic newspapers. We find that social media outperform all other sources by a wide margin, and conclude that international news media, the source of all existing transnational datasets, suffers from severe validity problems. We are certain that these results also apply to other authoritarian regimes.

Website & more info

More info: http://respo5.eas.univie.ac.at/Responsiveness/.